5.25.09 | Mary Vanac

National Institutes of Health getting into the drug development business? MedCity morning read, May 25, 2009

The National Institutes of Health is wading into the drug development process by making grants to find and develop drugs for rare diseases, often called orphan diseases, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Under a program announced Wednesday, the nation’s medical research agency also would target medicines for diseases, like malaria, that are rare in the United States but plague people who live in tropical regions of the world, the Journal said.

“We’ve never tried to directly develop medicines for rare and neglected diseases,” said NIH Acting Director Raynard Kington while announcing the new grant program. NIH traditionally has made mostly basic science grants, not grants to support development to get drugs ready for human testing.

The $24 million program jump starts the Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases program, which will span NIH centers, the agency said. The program is unusual because it is aimed at creating the NIH’s first drug development pipeline and collaboration among researchers who work on rare illnesses.

The program comes with new money from Congress that’s aimed at finding new treatments for 6,800 rare illnesses that affect about 25 million Americans, the Journal said. Of these diseases, only 200 have treatments, NIH said.

Drug companies often shy away from finding or developing treatments for orphan or neglected diseases because it often is unprofitable work and doesn’t offer sufficient return on investment.

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