Over the past two decades, competition in the pharmaceutical industry has been characterized by three factors:
- Competitive advantage driven by blockbuster drugs 2. Vertical integration from discovery through sales 3. Peripheral role as suppliers in the health care system In this environment, success was based on a combination of serendipity and operational capabilities. In recent years, there has been an explosion of new technologies, which will significantly increase the potential for creating value and decreasing serendipity.
One such bundle is "genomics and information technologies." Advances in genome and information technologies are generating biological information on a scale that is unprecedented in any field. Powerful DNA sequencing equipment combined with an army of robots and vast amounts of computing power now make it practical and cost effective to sequence whole genomes. Therefore, the sequence of the human genome will be at least 85% complete within a year, and all three billion base pairs will be known within three. Approximately 500,000 common sequence variants (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, "SNPs") will also be identified in that time.
The Human Genome Project (see this issue, D. Bentley) has been a major discovery driver of genome and information technologies that has significantly increased the potential for value creation by the pharmaceutical industry. Genetics, genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics are already impacting the way we carry out our drug discovery and are starting to increase the number of novel "drugable" targets at a higher quality level (see this issue, T. Harris). If the effort is successful, health care will shift from a paradigm of detect and treat, typically with toxic drugs that sometimes do no more than mask symptoms, to predict and prevent, with therapies of exquisite specificity aimed at the causes of disease. Furthermore, the genomic's mission is to decrease timelines for target discovery, drug discovery, and development and that with biological information. These technologies are already leading to a better understanding of potential disease pathways in humans by exploiting diseases in model organisms such as the mouse (see this issue, D. West, et al.).