Genomics
THE POST
GENOMICS ERA what does it all mean and how can we translate it?
Information may no longer be a bottleneck to understanding and tackling complex genetic diseases such as cancer. For those who cut their research teeth not so very long ago, before PCR was thought of by Kary Mullis, this is truly an amazing position to be in. To think that effective management of cancer is potentially just a time and money issue equation, where new disease causation data needs to be converted into novel ‘targeted’ or ‘personalised’ therapies, how can we eliminate drug discovery economics as an overriding limiting factor?
I
n contrast to the process of drug discovery, which has remained much the same for the past 10 years, advances in genome sequencing and research have been exponential during this time. Moreover, we are probably not seeing a plateau in these capabilities yet and even now we have literally hundreds of potential new targets in cancer alone to pursue for new therapies. So what now must be done to speed up the translation of these targets into drugs?
One of the first issues is that many candidates are not directly ‘drugable’ and thus require addi- tional searches downstream for drugable proteins. The second issue is that many putative new cancer targets are low in frequency, making them chal- lenging to pick up by biotech and pharma until new information on their role in normal and dis- ease biology is defined; especially if they can be placed in higher frequency cancer pathways. This is one area, therefore, that academia can have a major impact on by continuing to de-orphan these targets and perhaps even perform end-to-end drug
Drug Discovery World Spring 2011 discovery.
Finally, new technologies are sorely needed to reduce the large amounts of time, money and attrition associated with all stages of drug dis- covery and development, in particular those asso- ciated with performing large and unselected clini- cal trials.
It is the thesis of this editorial that academia and industry must heavily invest in a post-genomics world; firstly to understand ‘what it all means’, ie decipher which genetic variations are consequen- tial and which are merely random noise; secondly, design early and accurate diagnostic tests to enable potentially remedial therapies to be given before cancers become incurable; and thirdly, to have accurate and predictive models of human cancer, so that novel treatments can be developed quicker and directed to the patients most likely to respond. Such focused drug development will not only be faster and more likely to succeed, but also be more ethical to the patient, who has a better chance of entering into a worthwhile trial. To usher in this new era of high-throughput functional genomics,
25 By Dr Chris Torrance
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