ABSTRACT
Genomics has both captivated and disenchanted the pharmaceutical industry: captivated in that the sequence information will doubtless provide molecular explanations and therapeutic targets for all human diseases, yet disenchanted in that it has proven to be difficult to translate the sequence information into drug discovery. The difficulty arises largely from two factors. First, the pharmaceutical infrastructure has not been developed to process the hundreds of new targets in an efficient and cost-effective manner. The many targets revealed by the genomic technologies must still be pared down to a handful that can be processed using traditional strategies. Second, genomic information is useful for drug discovery only if expressed in structural and functional terms, and it is still impossible to predict protein structure, function, and disease relevance from sequence information.
