Ronald Rogers

BIOINFORMATICS BEGINS TO BUZZ

More than just a buzzword, bioinformatics promises to revolutionize the drug discovery process by organizing knowledge. Before the promise of bioinformatics is realized, however, industry participants must clear some significant hurdles, including the lack of experienced professionals and computer standards and industry consolidation. Throughout the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry invested heavily in instrumentation and databases to support genomics, combinatorial chemistry, and high-throughput-screening research activities. Soon afterward, companies were confronted with information overload as massive amounts of gene-sequence and chemical-library data were produced. Glaxo- Wellcome, for example, says it is testing 50,000 compounds per day across 50 diseases, resulting in 500 million new data points annually. Companies also are coping with large volumes of gene-sequence information stored in public databases such as the Merck Gene Index or the Human Genome Project, which already has sequenced 12% of th...