For more than 50 years, U.S. academic medical centers (AMCs) have been the global engine for pharmaceutical innovation, dedicated to medical education, scientific research, and patient care.
But at the time, his skepticism represented a familiar story: Bold, visionary ideas are met with resistance and fear from industries entrenched in conventional wisdom. Yet, time and again, we've seen how disruptors use technology and sheer conviction to rewrite the rules and yield transformative outcomes. In the last decade alone, this played out across industries like transportation, aerospace, and defense-from electric vehicles challenging Detroit to reusable rockets shattering the assumption of expendable space travel.
The U.S. and its citizens should not be the ones to shoulder the burden of subsidizing the world's access to drugs and biologics. Nor should the U.S. patent system - the envy of the world - be made the scapegoat for the lack of lower drug costs domestically.
"We're able to transform a prolific environmental and societal waste into such a globally important medication in a way that's completely impossible, using chemistry alone or using biology alone," says study coauthor Stephen Wallace, a chemical biotechnologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Spravato, also known as esketamine, targets glutamate and can produce rapid effects for those with treatment-resistant depression, offering hope where traditional antidepressants fail.