The advantage in global expression profiling is the development of a broad understanding of the mechanisms underlying the process. It is the accumulation of the supportive data gathered from functional classes that enables more robust hypotheses to be formed and tested. In turn this allows further focussed research into specific genes or functional classes as has already been performed by several laboratories (42, 80) . Novel treatment strategies may be identified from the identification of the involvement of functional groups with development of new pharmacological agents targeting the specific biological process.