未来目标攻克五种癌症_BEC初级作文

未来目标攻克五种癌症

In recent years many big drug companies have gutted their research departments. This is partly because those departments have failed to come up with new "blockbuster" drugs of the sort that created Big Pharma in the first place, and partly because the big firms' bosses had hoped that smaller biotechnology companies, of the sort Dr DePinho has helped set up, would do the hard work of drug discovery instead, and then let themselves be bought by the big firms.

最近这些年来，很多大制药公司取消了他们的研究部。部分原因是，这些研究部没能研制出当初做大这些大制药公司的拳头产品那种量级的新产品，部分原因是，那些大制药公司的老板们希望徳平厚博士那样的小生物技术公司承担发明新药的艰巨工作，然后再把这些小公司收购进来。

Unfortunately, it hasn't quite worked out like that. The output of the biotech firms has been a trickle, rather than a torrent. They have been one of the worst-performing parts of the private-equity market since 2007, according to Dr DePinho. He hopes to change that—and in the matter of new anti-cancer drugs, the science is looking auspicious. For example, a drug called vemurafenib, which was approved for use in America in August 2011, gives months of extra life to people with metastasising melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers. Vemurafenib is so powerful that some people call it a "Lazarus" drug, after the chap Jesus is said to have raised from the dead.