Advances in Genomics and Proteomics is Transforming the Landscape of Drug Discovery

Nov. 4, 2009 - PRLog -- Piribo, the online destination for business intelligence for the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, has added a new report analysing drug discovery.

“Transforming Drug Discovery through Genomics and Proteomics” reports that the process of drug discovery involves the identification of candidates, synthesis, characterisation, screening, and assays for therapeutic efficacy. Once a compound has shown its value in these tests, it will begin the process of drug development prior to clinical trials.

The 46 page report looks at how advances in genomics and proteomics are transforming the landscape of drug discovery and drug development. The report analyses the basics and processes of both genomics and proteomics, the various technologies involved in the process of drug development, genomics and proteomics.

Authors of the report note that in medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered and/or designed. In the past most drugs have been discovered either by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery. A new approach has been to understand how disease and infection are controlled at the molecular and physiological level and to target specific entities based on this knowledge.

Despite advances in technology and understanding of biological systems, drug discovery is still a long process with low rate of new therapeutic discovery. Information on the human genome, its sequence and what it encodes has been hailed as a potential windfall for drug discovery, promising to virtually eliminate the bottleneck in therapeutic targets that has been one limiting factor on the rate of therapeutic discovery.

However, the report shows that data indicates that "new targets" as opposed to "established targets" are more prone to drug discovery project failure in general. This data corroborates some thinking underlying a pharmaceutical industry trend beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century and continuing today which finds more risk aversion in target selection among multi-national pharmaceutical companies.

“Transforming Drug Discovery through Genomics and Proteomics” is available from Piribo. For more information go to:
http://www.piribo.com/publications/drug_discovery/transfo...

Piribo product ID: PRC00008

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About Piribo.
Piribo (http://www.piribo.com/publications/drug_discovery/index.html) is a UK-based independent online store supplying business information on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The website now carries over 17,000 English language titles including, market reports, studies and books and is the UK’s largest online biopharma information store. Subscribers receive a free monthly newsletter and email alerts on new titles in their areas of interest. The company was established in 2004.