Page 50 - Drug Discovery and Development: Prospects and Challenges

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Sejahtera Academic Framework (Borhan et al., 2021), IIUM has outlined
a transformation concept on humanising education for Rahmatan lil-
alamin. In the context of humanising education, IIUM introduced the
tagline ‘Khalifah, Amanah, Iqra’, Rahmatan lil-Alamin’ (KhAIR) to be
adopted as part of the graduate attributes. The KhAIR tagline is an Arabic
word, which translates for “good”. The KhAIR concept is a simplified
expression of the seven IIUM missions and it is hoped that the efforts
will contribute to the development of successful and well balanced IIUM
graduates post-COVID-19.

Brothers and sisters,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Conclusion

Drug discovery and development are costly and timely. It takes 12–15
years and over USD 1 billion just to produce a single drug for a particular
disease. The failure rate is extremely high with only one would be
available in the market out of the thousands of drug candidates tested.
Despite its significant challenge to producing a safe and effective drug,
the process continues to achieve success thanks to the combined efforts
of the academic world and private industry. Driven by medical needs
and the emergence of new diseases, research on new drugs involves
the translation of basic scientific findings from a laboratory setting into
human use. Seyhan stated several reasons that impede the continuous
development of drugs, including poor hypothesis, irreproducible data,
ambiguous pre-clinical models, inappropriate statistical model, and
insufficient funding (Seyhan, 2019). These drawbacks may cause a
translational gap, which later he called as “valley of death” in drug
discovery and development. Concerning the development of C. asiatica
for medical use, it is still an on-going process, which requires funding
and support either from the government or industrial pharmacy for
further development. We also welcome other researchers to collaborate
on this project.