"A must-read for a 'behind the scenes' look at new drug development."
--Madelyn Fernstrom, PhD, NBC News Health Editor. The surprising,
behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a
veteran drug hunter.
The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as
old as the human race. Through serendipity-- by chewing, brewing, and
snorting--some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot,
juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances.
Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian
Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze-age
medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.
Nowadays, Big Pharma conglomerates spend billions of dollars on state-of
the art laboratories staffed by PhDs to discover blockbuster drugs. Yet,
despite our best efforts to engineer cures, luck, trial-and-error, risk,
and ingenuity are still fundamental to medical discovery.
The Drug Hunters is a colorful, fact-filled narrative history of the
search for new medicines from our Neolithic forebears to the
professionals of today, and from quinine and aspirin to Viagra, Prozac,
and Lipitor. The chapters offer a lively tour of how new drugs are
actually found, the discovery strategies, the mistakes, and the rare
successes of drug hunters from the US, UK, Germany, and other nations.
Dr. Donald R. Kirsch infuses the book with his own expertise and
experiences from thirty-five years of drug hunting, whether searching
for life-saving molecules in mudflats by Chesapeake Bay or as a chief
science officer and research group leader at major pharmaceutical
companies.
