Drug Discovery: Methods for Identifying New Drug Targets

During the past century human life expectancy has increased significantly due to improved health care, including the availability of vaccines and new pharmaceutical drugs. With the aging population on the rise, complex diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and various types of cancers, combined with new diseases with debilitating consequences can reduce the general quality of life. This, together with the fact that the drug discovery and developmental process is competitive, lengthy, risky, and expensive with a high failure rate, poses challenging opportunities for the development of new drugs. Thus, the new drug development process demands approaches that aim to increase the probability of robust target identification with quick validation such that the subsequent failure rate can be reduced to manageable levels. This review will focus on new approaches, both genomic and proteomic, that have been developed over the last few years and successfully used to discover new genes and proteins, quantify and analyze gene and protein expressions and assign functionalities. In addition, we will also discuss the limitations of these technologies with the intention of setting reasonable expectations.