The Rolling Stones Were Right

When I find myself in times of trouble, I return to the music of my youth for guidance. And more often than not, I return to the wisdom of the Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want.” And how true that is in the debate over stem cells.

I’m attending both the Democratic and Republican conventions this year to spread the word about the mission of FasterCures /The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions and to raise awareness of the opportunity we have as a nation to save lives by saving time in the process of discovering and developing new medical solutions for deadly and debilitating diseases. At the recent Democratic Convention, even before John Kerry mentioned stem cells, I got a chill up my spine when he asked us to imagine what it would be like to cure Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and diabetes. At FasterCures, we imagine that every day. I hope I have the opportunity to get the same chill when President Bush speaks at the Republican Convention, even if he has a different ending to the sentence.

While I believe stem cell research holds great promise for finding new cures, accelerating the arrival of new medical solutions is about a great deal more than stem cell research.

The philosopher Henry Adams once spent an entire day staring at the “dynamo” – the first steam engine – which he knew would change the world. His sole focus was on the engine – not the train tracks, navigable rivers, or timetables. In other words, he was too busy studying the engine to worry about the infrastructure that would support it. And that is where we are today. While the stem cell research debate is timely and important, of even more importance to the field of medical research is the infrastructure in which stem cell research and other critical avenues of research are implemented.

There are significant challenges slowing the path to medical breakthroughs: approximately 41,000 clinical trials are underway in the United States at any given time, yet it is estimated that less than five percent of individuals afflicted with a given disease take part in relevant clinical trials; any drug candidate that enters clinical development will have demonstrated evidence of safety and efficacy in preclinical models, yet still faces a greater than 90 percent chance of failure; getting through all the phases of clinical trials typically required for approval of a new drug can run anywhere from $300 million to $800 million; and the list goes on.

In order to ensure the success of new avenues of research, we first must address these challenges and make fundamental changes to the biomedical discovery, research and development infrastructure. We need to change the way we design clinical trials to make them more meaningful, relevant and attractive to patients currently reluctant to enroll in them. We need to bridge the “translational” gap between basic research and clinical application – shifting from curing diseases in mice to curing them in people. We need to create new and better databases of medical records and biological specimens for research purposes. And we need to develop incentives to speed innovative therapies through the industry and government pipelines and out to patients much more quickly than we do today.

Both sides of the stem cell debate are proving “You can’t always get what you want.” While everyone involved would most likely agree that they ultimately want to find cures faster, neither side can win this battle if the larger problem is not addressed. The primary focus must be on what we need to do to fix our current biomedical research and drug development systems in order to speed all new breakthroughs, stem cell derived or otherwise, to patients as soon as possible.

For as the Rolling Stones put it best, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.” And what we need is not just new breakthroughs going through the same old system; what we need are breakthroughs in the system itself. And that is something all political parties should embrace.

Greg Simon
President, FasterCures / The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions