ABSTRACT
Pharmaceutical companies are facing new challenges in the starting millennium. Drug discovery is a high-stakes game; therefore, innovative strategies are being planned for the research and development of new and novel breakthrough products (1-7). Genomics, high-throughput screening, robotics, combinatorial chemistry, proteomics, proteinomimetics, informatics, and miniaturization are some of the strategies that are revolutionizing drug discovery efforts (8-18). In addition, the genome age will change biology forever, providing sequence blueprints for numerous bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals, and thus facilitating the understanding of human behavior, disease, and other health issues. Nevertheless, as the Human Genome Initiative nears completion, it is becoming increasingly clear that the behavior of gene products is difficult or impossible to predict from the gene sequence (19-21).
