Genetics / genomics

The promise of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics By Dr Tim Peakman and Dr Steve Arlington Within the next 10 years the benefits of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics will inevitably outweigh the disadvantages. But what are the commercial and legal implications for the pharmaceutical industry especially for companies who have lead candidates ready to enter development? The twenty-first […]

Discovery Research in the Co-Genomic Era – Biology goes industrial By Dr Timothy Wells and Dr Georg Feger The parallel between the search for gold in the last century and drug discovery in the co-genome era is very clear. As with all gold rushes the rewards will go to the most creative entrepreneurs who can […]

Do venture capitalists act as gatekeepers of new technology? By Dr June Grindley and Samantha Smart This article discusses the important role that venture capitalists and others play in helping to create companies around new technologies. We asked a number of venture capitalists, when considering funding a new company, what was most important to them […]

The Industrialisation of Bioinformatics By Dr Alex Titomirov With the completion of the ‘draft’ sequence of the human genome predicting an estimate of 40,000-120,000 genes that describe us, the real work begins. The problem now is not lack of data but lack of tools to thoroughly analyse what we already have and what’s coming in […]

By Michael P. Murphy, MSc Pharmacogenomics offers the opportunity to adopt a new paradigm in drug development. The pharmaceutical industry is faced with a number of challenges including relatively low productivity and success in bringing new drugs to market. Investors demand that pharmaceutical companies deliver several new drugs to the marketplace each year. Additional pressure […]

The role of toxicogenomics in drug discovery By Dr Robin E. Neft and Dr Spencer Farr The information that toxicogenomics can bring in terms of toxic mechanisms, safety and efficacy must ultimately have a major impact on the drug discovery process. Large scale genome sequencing has lead to elucidation of the entire human genome totalling […]

Using Expression Databases for Drug Discovery By Dr Greg Lennon Reference databases are being built cataloguing the amount of RNA each gene makes under different conditions and in different individuals. These databases can be mined easily and effectively to aid the drug discovery process. The success of the Human Genome Project provokes the question: what […]