|
Drug Discovery and Development |
Welcome
Welcome to the D3, the Research Unit of the IIT dedicated to the discovery of new medicines. My name is Daniele Piomelli and I am the Unit’s scientific director.
With my colleagues, a group of talented researchers coming from both industry and academia, I believe that a steady flow of safe and effective new drugs is important to keep our world healthy and productive. The last twenty years have witnessed great advances in medical science, yet many diseases still plague our communities and remain both ill-treated and poorly understood – think about Alzheimer’s disease, neuropathic pain and rheumatoid arthritis.
When education and prevention fail to control disease, we turn to medicines for help. This has become such an engrained part of our behavior that most of us give drugs for granted – who spends any time imagining how was life before the invention of antibiotics or surgical anesthetics? But medicines are not a given. They don’t grow on trees. To the contrary, they are the fruit of enduring passion and hard work.
Till a few years ago, most drug discovery work was done in large pharmaceutical companies, where scientists used basic science findings made in academic labs and transformed them into clinically useful drugs. Things are changing, however, as economic and regulatory pressures force pharmaceutical companies to focus on immediate financial returns, pushing them to curb their riskiest projects – the least likely to succeed in the short run, but also the most creative and potentially rewarding ones.
At the D3, we gauge the value of a project on its therapeutic importance, not its risk. We focus on novel mechanisms in areas of great unmet medical need and work together with partners in the pharmaceutical industry and venture capital world to advance our discoveries to the public and the market.
|
Drug Discovery and Development