Emerging Drug Discovery Technologies: Building competitive advantage through lab-on-a-chip, nanotechnology and RNAi

Executive Summary

The last decade has been marked by an unprecedented boom in the number and variety of technologies used to discover and develop new drugs; many of these technologies arose from work surrounding the human genome project. For example, gene sequencing, gene expression profiling and genotyping have greatly benefited from technological advances, resulting in dramatically higher throughputs and rapid declines in cost. For some other areas it has proven to be more of a challenge to achieve performance improvements of the same magnitude. Defining the function of each gene, or more specifically, the protein it encodes, has been particularly challenging. It is not yet possible to study gene function with the type of "massively parallel" approaches used in other fields.