Bioinformatics companies, however, are using the brute force of old technologies to crunch their data. We're going to have to have a breakthrough here. If researchers are going to extract drug discoveries out of GenBank the Human Genome Project's free database, and Celera the company that created its own genome map, without getting buried in information, biotech will need revolutionary, eureka-style discoveries. The program can tell researchers that a certain heart drug, for example, will cause the left ventricle to expand. Money spent on research and development at pharmaceutical companies has increased at a staggering rate.
Drug discovery is an imprecise process that relies heavily on serendipity.
Pharmaceutical companies come up with about 140 new drug candidates per year, but only about seven are marketed. Big pharmaceuticals typically aim to develop two new drugs per year, and most have failed. Scientists tested the In Silico Cell on a heart drug originally developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb. The drug made it to Phase Three clinical trials in 1995 where, unexpectedly, it killed several women. In 1999, Physiome used the drug to test In Silico Cell.