Of the nearly $37 billion Americans spend on dietary supplements each year, about two-thirds are for vitamins and minerals. The rest are pills, powders, and tinctures that contain various substances isolated from an array of sources — mainly plants but also animals and microorganisms.
Why are these products so popular? Some people believe that our food supply has been stripped of important nutrients, so they take supplements to replace what’s “missing” (although many foods are already fortified to replace vitamins that are destroyed during processing). Others feel that Western medicine relies too heavily on pharmaceuticals and prefer to take natural substances instead. (However, a number of common drugs are derived from plants.)
But the real reason the supplement industry is thriving dates back to a law enacted nearly 25 years ago, says Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies dietary supplements. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 defined supplements as foods, not drugs. That means they’re not subject to the same regulations governing the quality and safety of prescription drugs.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.