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The genomics era has brought forth
a wealth of information that has revolutionized the way we do science and has
had a large impact in drug discovery. One of the major bottlenecks we face at
the moment is how to establish a link from the genomic information into function
and relevance to disease. Pharmacom intends to integrate database mining,
functional genomics, automation, and bioinformatics to assign function to novel
targets. Genomics by itself cannot
usually determine even the biochemical, much less the cellular or physiological
functions of a protein. Structural biology can determine the shape of the
protein but cannot reliably determine its function; the coupling between overall
structure and function is a loose one. Given a structure, one cannot determine
where on the surface of a protein the likely binding sites for ligands are
located and what those ligands are likely to be. Genomewide experiments have
many false positives and false negatives and often do not distinguish indirect
effects from direct ones. The consequences of the expression of a given gene
sequence can only be determined by integrating the results from many different
types of experiments, and the best way to carry out this integration is not
obvious. |