drug discovery

This week Boston's hosts a meeting on drug discovery at the new convention center. New drugs are still the results of endless and sometimes mindless testing of candidate chemicals on biological systems. There is a major attempt to make the discovery process more rational using the human genome sequence information and a better understanding of drug targets such as protein receptors. There is a long way to go. The exhibits show an almost endless array of robotic chemical processing systems to speed up the process. Also, now we have RNA chips that can look at the activity of 30,000 genes in a single experiment. This is done to see which active genes are affected by a specific chemical. Such “gene” chips should also be useful at identifying potential side effects before clinical trials. If the product of a critical gene is depressed then there is a good chance that one will see bad things happen in the clinical trials. A current problem is that while we can see which genes are active many of them have no known function. As time goes on most we will learn the function of most of the genes and the techniques will become more useful. It can only get better.