Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 206-209. (Budapest, 2009)
KISEBB KÖZLEMÉNYEK —COMMUNICATIONS - Székely, József I.: Szabálytalan gyászbeszéd az utolsó szocialista gyógyszerkutató mammutvállalat (a Gyógyszerkutató Intézet, a korábbi Gyógyszeripari Kutató Intézet) kimúlása alkalmából
220 Comm. de //ist. Artis Med. 206- 209 (2009) for most chemists reproduction was only a kind of "compulsory figure" and the coworkers of the IDR took pride in the development of original compounds and academic-type of research. So what about the original and academic research? The IDR started in a converted downtown tenement house, than moved to a self-constructed big campus in an industrial suburb of Budapest, and latter another campus was built just beyond the city line. The number of its coworkers quickly rose to about 800 - 900, though big research institutions are difficult to steer in proper direction. No problem, at the beginning the IDR received many tasks and commissions from the pharmaceutical factories thus for a while the concept of "planned economy , , seemed to be workable. Talented young people flocked there because IDR was something new, the tasks were numerous and also for political reasons. Namely people who were kicked out of universities for being politically unreliable e.g. for being "clerical" i.e. having ties with the churches, found refuge in the IDR. Of course even within IDR too there was an "in house" party organization but many of party members hated the communist system just as the non-party-members. E.g. one of the former directors was an ardent communist on workdays and pious, churchgoing Catholic during the weekends. Thus the rules of communist orthodoxy at the IDR were not taken as seriously as at the universities. In the IDR, being a big institution, many dozens of research projects ran parallelly and most of the executives were unable grasp their details, or to overview this conglomerate. Fortunately, the in-house bureaucracy and chaos enabled many talented staff members to pursue their own ideas in the frame of the ill-defined "drug research". (Of course many others only pretended working, they just lazed around.) But where was the funding from? At the beginning the IDR functioned as an independent, state-owned enterprise and its main income came from commissions given by the big Hungárián pharmaceutical factories. In addition IDR as patent owner shared the commercial profit. Of course, it was a command economy where all the enterprises, including the IDR, were owned by the State and also the prices of the pharmaceuticals, raw materials, and energy were fixed by the government. Thus the financial accounting had little to do with the economic reality. This "chaos" enabled the IDR to divert a part of its resources for genuine, academic research. Unfortunately very few of the original Hungárián pharmaceuticals reached the Western market (including also the ones developed by the factories themselves). Firstly because many of them were neither really original nor more effective than the Western rivals, secondly for lack of trust, whether the drug safety studies were conducted with appropriate care (unfortunately true in several cases), thirdly because a poor communist country lacked the marketing infrastructure abroad and the money in generál for the expensive widespread clinical studies. So the only solution was to seil the drug candidates still in preclinical or early clinical stage of development to a big Western finn. Unfortunately many of them abused their monopoly. E.g. in the early nineties IDR sold two drug candidates to an American giant. (Let us omit its name here.) One was a potent antithrombotic peptide (efegatran), the other one an antepileptic agent with növel biological mechanism of action (talanipcinel). Neither has become drug. Why? We do not understand it even today. May be that several American colieagues were reluctant to acknowledge the originality of the "savage" Hungarians and of course, even the giant international companies may have inept CEO's. Anyhow, both drug candidates were used as reference compounds i.e. starting materials to synthesize better ones.
