New paradigms for cancer drug discovery?

Discovering drugs has never been an easy task. Traditionally, this task has exclusively been undertaken by large pharmaceutical companies that recovered their high R&D costs by selling expensive medications. Despite the huge amount of time and effort devoted towards drug discovery over the last decade, the successful therapy of cancer has been limited. There are signs that the approach of how to discover drugs might change, especially in the field of cancer. Recently, several academic institutions have started to develop their own drug discovery programs. By pointing out the critical elements of the cancer drug discovery process, we examine why it would not be a surprise if some future cancer drugs will come out of academic research institutions and complement the ones being developed by big pharma.