Pharmaceuticals like the polio vaccine, penicillin and insulin have delivered miraculous results – extending human lifespans and vastly improving the quality of life for people across the planet.

For example, polio was once “the most feared disease in the world,” according to the World Health Organization. Because polio mostly impacted young children, the fear of polio kept many parents up at night, and for good reason. Before polio vaccines were introduced in the 1950s, polio paralyzed more than 15,000 people annually in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But widespread polio vaccination in the U.S. has eliminated wild polio, as the CDC reported in June, “with no cases occurring in the country since 1979.”

Penicillin, which has been around even longer, has helped many people around the world to fight off potentially deadly diseases, including bacterial meningitis, pneumonia and strep throat.

And diabetics didn’t live for long before the discovery of insulin, as the American Diabetes Association reports. The best doctors could do before insulin was to put diabetic patients on restrictive diets, some with just 450 calories a day, to try to buy them a few extra years of life.

These are just a few examples of pharmaceuticals that have greatly improved the human condition. There are many others, including birth control pills, chemotherapy drugs, COVID-19 vaccines, heart medicines, pharmaceuticals for mental health and steroids for inflammation.

While drugs have certainly come a long way, there is still great opportunity for innovation in drug discovery and development to battle disease, help patients deal with pain and other health concerns, and enable people to have fewer challenges and greater choice in their lives.

However, drug discovery can take years – even more than a decade. This article in the National Library of Medicine indicates drug discovery and development typically took 12 or more years between the early 1990s and late 2000s. And that doesn’t include the time it takes to get U.S. Food and Drug Administration or other regulatory approval, make the drug and get it to market.

That just doesn’t work in a world in which every country now faces an aging population, we continue to see COVID-19 surges and multiple sources threaten to prompt the next pandemic.

But Standigm is accelerating drug discovery. That way, pharmaceutical companies can develop life-changing drugs faster and get them to the people who need them sooner rather than later.