Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
On the Horizon
The current interest in bioinformatics is primarily focused on accelerating the expensive drug
discovery process. Bioinformatics is currently viewed by the Pharma industry as a means of weeding
out problem drugs more quickly and earlier in the R&D process. Although this view has yet to be
validated by a viable product produced by bioinformatics methods alone, firms that rely heavily on
bioinformatics techniques are projecting an R&D investment of 20 percent on sales. This may seem
prohibitively expensive, given the industry standard of 12 percent on sales. However, the hope is that
new bioinformatics methods will more accurately reject drugs that may cause serious side effects,
drugs that as of now aren't discovered until millions of dollars have been invested in marketing and
sales efforts.
Over the life of a drug, the initial R&D investment in bioinformatics methods could more than pay for
itself if computational methods could be used to identify molecules that behave like other molecules
known to cause serious side effects. Over the past 25 years, half of the dangerous side effects of
drugs were recognized over 7 years after the drugs were approved. Pulling a drug from the market
because of lethal side effects at this late stage is not only expensive, but these findings typically
extend the FDA's approval time because of public pressure to be more vigilant.
Clearly, if bioinformatics is to solve the drug side-effect dilemma, practitioners in the field will have to
work not only with gene expression and proteomic databases, but with clinical medicine databases as
well. However, given the exponential growth of data in molecular biology as well as in virtually every
clinical medicine domain, it's unlikely that molecular biology researchers will have sufficient
knowledge or resources to manually establish and maintain links between findings in their field.
Furthermore, it's even less likely that complete, up-to-date predefined links to databases in other
fields can be maintained. More likely is continued work in the area of search engine technology that
can create dynamic links between protein folding, DNA sequence, and inherited disease databases, as
well as links between these databases and those in fields as diverse as physics, biochemistry, and the
law.
