What are the developments and trends in therapeutic innovation at the start of the 21st century? The meteoric progress of molecular biology and genetics, the emergence of new methods for studying diseases, and the rise of bioinformatics, have given us hope, throughout the last twenty years, that therapeutic innovation would see a new level of effectiveness. But what has been achieved?
Some fields, such as oncology, have benefited greatly from these advances, while others seem to have stalled. We are still waiting for effective drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease and, faced with bacterial resistance to "old" antibiotics, we note that our therapeutic arsenal has not been renewed. The costs of therapeutic innovation are increasingly high, and the major pharmaceutical groups are abandoning areas that have become unprofitable in relation to the investment required.