Companies that do strike gold get to introduce new classes of drugs to the market. Others hope to make genetic tests that can identify people at risk for disease, or to help companies target their drugs to the genetic subpopulation that responds best. Because only time will tell which genes are useful and which are not, universities and companies are taking no chances, and are staking claims to as many of the recently revealed genetic properties as they can identify. This approach, however, is producing a bottleneck of sorts: Massive amounts of time and money must be spent sifting through those genes to find the ones that are implicated in disease.
Scientists take three basic approaches to gene discovery: association, gene expression, and functional studies. Association studies—the most common gene identification approach— connect genetic markers with a disease population, whereas gene expression studies examine genes that are differentially expressed between ...
