Trough of disillusionment...? Or wrong-targeted drugs.

I was always amazed by targeting concepts in drug development – to develop a drug targeted therapy sounds like to make a step in a direction to make a magic bullet – a drug which does not any harm, only cure the disease. And for me personally who do not believe in a possibility to develop anything close to the magic bullet (will not discuss my arguments here and now) every time when the term “targeted” used or misused it becomes absolutely clear that the therapy in question will have problems when being compared with a standard non-targeted therapy. In the best case if any targeted drug is successful it is only means that there is some unknown effect of the action of the drug which is lying in the background which provides the therapy with its efficacy. Once again – it can be whichever effect but NOT the “targeting” by itself.

One of the latest examples of the failure is here. Some relevant reading is here.

And basically I thing that with “targeted” concept we are very close to “Trough of disillusionment” point on the hype curve. I am just waiting what concept will come up next in the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. I have heard somewhere very exciting stories about quantum-nanoparticles (what it can be???) as a novel anticancer therapy… J