Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a significant innovation crisis. It would seem that the era of ‘big hit’ drugs, science driven by high-throughput chemistry and pharmaceutical companies is nearing an end, with most major drug patents expiring within two years. Only just a few years ago there was enormous excitement around how functional genomics and other ‘high resolution’ technologies would allow systems biology to reinvigorate drug R&D. These days we see a large return to traditional methods, amidst complaints that omics hasn’t truly helped make any decisions but just added to the data burden.

The talk will be a general discussion on current drug discovery trends, ‘big data’ approaches, ‘open-source’ biology, where the problems are, and suggested solutions. As a case study, we will use toxicogenomics software and models developed in-house at SimuGen, a pharmacogenomics company born at CCBI .