The Drug Hunters

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. 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.

Hailed by John le Carré as “an act of courage on the part of its author” and singled out for praise by the leading medical journals in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Body Hunters uncovers the real-life story behind le Carré’s acclaimed novel The Constant Gardener and the feature film based on it. "A trenchant exposé . . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence" (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shah’s riveting journalistic account shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing new global trend. Drawing on years of original research and reporting in Africa and Asia, Shah examines how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun exporting its clinical research trials to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, “it is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories,” which tell of an impossible choice being faced by many of the world’s poorest patients—be experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.

Few scientists have the knowledge to perform the studies that are necessary to discover and characterize enzyme inhibitors, despite the vested interest the pharmaceutical industry has in this field. Beginning with the most basic principles pertaining to simple, one-substrate enzyme reactions and their inhibitors, and progressing to a thorough treatment of two-substrate enzymes, Kinetics of Enzyme Action: Essential Principles for Drug Hunters provides biochemists, medicinal chemists, and pharmaceutical scientists with numerous case study examples to outline the tools and techniques necessary to perform, understand, and interpret detailed kinetic studies for drug discovery.

Hunter Biden recounts his descent into substance abuse and his tortuous path to sobriety. The story ends with where Hunter is today

Drug Discovery with Privileged Building Blocks traces back PharmaBlockʹs founding philosophy of designing privileged building blocks. High-quality building blocks are crucial not only to molecules' biological activities but also to ADMET properties, which eventually will impact the success rate of drug discovery projects. A thorough study of how building blocks perform in drug molecules and regular analysis of new building block structures in the latest researches has proven to be a fruitful strategy to generate novel building blocks. Using this strategy, PharmaBlock has supplied the drug industry with a great number of building blocks, which are increasingly being adopted by drug hunters, and these are identified in this book. Each chapter may be read and studied without learning the previous chapters. This book will be a good starting point for novice medicinal chemists and veteran medicinal chemists find it useful as well.

“The stories are skillfully told and entirely entertaining . . . An expert, mostly feel-good book about modern medicine” from the award-winning author (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be an oddball researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. Piece together these stories, as Thomas Hager does in this remarkable, century-spanning history, and you can trace the evolution of our culture and the practice of medicine. Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book. “[An] absorbing new book.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A] well-written and engaging chronicle.” —The Wall Street Journal “Lucidly informative and compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly “Entertaining [and] insightful.” —Booklist “Well-written, well-researched and fascinating to read Ten Drugs provides an insightful look at how drugs have shaped modern medical practices. Towards the end of the book Hager writes that he ‘came away surprised by some of the things he had learned.’ I had the very same reaction.” —Penny Le Couteur, coauthor of Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

The third edition of this best-selling book continues to offer a user-friendly, step-by-step introduction to all the key processes involved in bringing a drug to the market, including the performance of pre-clinical studies, the conduct of human clinical trials, regulatory controls, and even the manufacturing processes for pharmaceutical products. Concise and easy to read, Drugs: From Discovery to Approval, Third Edition quickly introduces basic concepts, then moves on to discuss target selection and the drug discovery process for both small and large molecular drugs. The third edition incorporates the latest developments and updates in the pharmaceutical community, provides more comprehensive coverage of topics, and includes more materials and case studies suited to college and university use. Biotechnology is a dynamic field with changes across R&D, clinical trials, manufacturing and regulatory processes, and the third edition of the text provides timely updates for those in this rapidly growing field.

New York Times Notable Book: “An exceptional, assured debut [that] captures the zeitgeist of confused adolescents and a sick culture post-Columbine.”—Hartford Courant A national bestseller that inspired a major motion picture, this chilling novel follows prep school dropout White Mike through the week between Christmas and New Year’s 1999, as he deals an alluring new drug to his privileged peers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The kids of Twelve have it all; Chris and Claude and Hunter and Laura have the best, and most, of everything, but are constantly looking for something more exotic, and more dangerous. But Twelve is not a coming-of-age story, because these kids never had a childhood—their parents are off on holiday in Bali or business in Brussels, leaving hired help to look the other way as the kids stay home alone in their multimillion-dollar town houses, partying, surrounded by drugs and sex—and, in the end, much worse. “Renders Manhattan’s cosseted Upper East Side with both the casual authority of an insider and the wry distance of an observer…impressive.”—Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review “Riveting in its no-holds-barred depiction of teenage nihilism.”—Jon Land, Providence Journal