DNA molecule from RasMol shown in our desktop MicroLab.
The drug discovery market is a multi-billion euro market. Every year huge amounts of money are spent on drug discovery. Despite these huge investments, the ‘output’ of new drugs is very limited. For many diseases and illnesses a proper cure has yet to be developed. Clearly, the current drug development techniques are far from perfect.
Currently, developing a new medicine is a process, which is mainly based on trial and error processes. This is not a very structural development system. A typical drug development process consequently takes around 10 to 12 years to be completed. Newly discovered diseases can therefore go untreated for a decade. Epidemics can rage for years before a proper treatment is found, affecting millions of people. Also chemical warfare is posing a very real threat nowadays and antidotes for these chemically designed weapons are almost impossible to develop on short term.
The Human Genome Project, a worldwide project to determine the makeup of the human DNA and the relation between a genome and the cause of an illness or disease, offers new opportunities for drug discovery. Thanks to this project a vast amount of new information is becoming available to researchers. The current drug discovery processes are not equipped to deal with the vast amount of information, which has recently become available (let alone the vast amount of information expected to become available in the near future). Furthermore, the problems researchers are faced with are too complex to be approached from the perspective of one single discipline (such as chemistry, bio-technology, physics or information technology). In short, a totally new, multi-disciplinary, approach is needed in order to be able to deal with the problems modern drug discovery researchers are faced with. Preferably, a multi-disciplinary approach which will strongly accelerate the drug discovery process and reduce its costs.