2023 年 40 巻 3 号 p. 173-178
Under the mission of establishing better treatment for neurological diseases, JSNT aims to investigate the issue and the needs for academic societies and conducted a survey on pharmaceutical companies. As an open–ended questionnaire, we asked about two questions : “current issues in promoting drug discovery and clinical trials in the area of neurological diseases” and “requests and expectations for academic societies in promoting drug discovery in neurological diseases”.
As a result, we obtained opinions from a total of 23 companies. Current issues include opinions on delays in clinical trial enrollment in Japan, especially limits on the number of cases enrolled per facility, high hurdles in pharmaceutical regulations and the need to develop clinical trial evaluation indicators. Regarding needs related to academic societies, we categorized comments into the following 10 items : “Support for clinical trials conducted by a pharm company”, “Building a disease registry and conducting longitudinal research of neurological diseases”, “building a foundation for efficacy evaluation in clinical research”, “building a foundation for industry-government-academia collaboration to revitalize drug discovery research and development in Japan”, “information delivery at academic conferences and lectures”, “development of human resources to lead drug discovery research, “cooperation with overseas academic societies”, support for doctors participating in clinical trials”, “provision of information to citizens and patients and listening to patient voices” and “approaches to regulatory authorities”.
The survey results clearly indicated issues in drug discovery from the perspective of pharmaceutical companies and the expected role of academic societies. Interestingly, well alignment between their expectations and JSNT's vision was confirmed. It is important to initiate implementation promptly depending on the prioritization and to make continuous effort in cooperation with other relevant stakeholders.
