The Adrian Salter Lecture
- PDF / 56,801 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 68 Downloads / 168 Views
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHARMACEUTICAL MEDICINE 2000, 14:57±58
57
Society of Pharmaceutical Medicine Society Executive Secretary: Chris Ryan 20±22 Queensbury Place, London SW7 2DZ
Editor: Martin W. Lunnon
The Adrian Salter Lecture Dr Adrian Salter was a far-sighted pharmaceutical physician and scientist who was a major force behind the founding of the Society of Pharmaceutical Medicine. The Society was launched in 1987 as a result of his and others' efforts to found an academic society for pharmaceutical medicine. An important part of the vision of this group was that the Society should be multi-disciplinary in constitution and challenging in nature to the concepts and methods employed in pharmaceutical medicine. As the Founding Secretary he shouldered the burden of compiling the constitution which was itself responsible for gaining the Society's charitable status and for negotiating even the name with other interested bodies. In 1989 he became Chairman and was instrumental in the launch of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Medicine (the previous Journal for the Society and a forerunner of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Medicine). Sadly, Adrian Salter died in 1993, although the Society which he helped to found is a continuing living memorial to him. An Annual Lecture has also been established in his honour. The 1999 Adrian Salter Lecture was held on 10 November at the Apothecaries' Hall in London. The honoured speaker invited to deliver the lecture was Dr George Poste CBE, FRS who spoke on the subject of `The In¯uence of Genetics on the Future Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry'. After an introduction from Dr John Pincott (Chairman of the SPM), Dr Poste started by saying what a scary but remarkable time we live in with technology moving so quickly that medicine can hardly keep up the pace; where we live in a time whereby medicine has been transformed from an empirical science to mechanistic approaches. With the advances in molecular biology and genomics this leads to a better understanding of individual variation and a better understanding of individual patients so that therapies need to be identi®ed according to the individual genomic make-up of the patient. He warned us to beware of the fast pace of change to ensure that medicine can keep up with other technological changes and as an example he asked us to look 10 years into the future, where a patient might not be able to
be treated in an emergency situation if they hadn't had their genomic map imprinted on a smart chip -as it would only be the reading of the chip, for example, which would make the machinery work. Dr Poste spoke about the building up of pattern arrays to give novel targets, how to target, select and funnel discoveries, for example, by specifying target genes or by looking at genes we do not need. In running through possibilities for targeting discoveries he reminded us that intellectual property rights in this area become very important for the intellectual protection of targets in cases of later retrograde discovery. Thou
Data Loading...
