FIGURE 1: Competing elements that influence target selection
In drug discovery, a research director faces considerable challenges trying to make consistently good decisions concerning target selection. The task is comparable to a treasure hunt with many enticing clues about where to dig, leading often to large, empty holes.
Many perceive the pharmaceutical business as being in a state of crisis. Financial survival and growth mandates the introduction of three or four new chemical entities each year. The gap between that ideal and the reality in achieving such targets gives us and our colleagues nightmares.
Poring through the wealth of genomic and high-throughput data and setting priority targets to maximize profitability sounds like a reasonable approach. But the knowledge base is insufficient to ensure a reasonable chance of success. Exciting targets identified from genomic datasets lack key information, namely, how a particular approach might work in a mammalian system.
In reality, ...
