A DRUG DISCOVERY KNOWLEDGE GAP
Rick Mullin, Vivien Marx · Chemical & Engineering News · 2004
GOVERNMENT, INDUSTRY, and academic representatives at IBC Life Science's 9th Annual World Congress on Drug Discovery Technology in Boston last week called for a heightened effort to better understand the biological mechanisms of disease. Such an endeavor, they said, will require increased interdisciplinary research at drug companies, better cooperation between universities and industry and information management to support an increasingly collaborative, data-intensive enterprise. Opening keynote speaker Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, called for "multipronged" strategies to address the challenge of developing drugs for chronic diseases. In describing NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research in the 21st century Zerhouni said multidisciplinary teams with access to public databases of chemical reactions must gain a greater ability to predict the behavior of biological systems. Zerhouni told of a recent meeting at which he asked biotech CEOs how much they knew about the diseases their firms were trying to treat. "They admitted they only knew ...