However, since repairing a gene has been proven to be next to impossible, research on the gene has little to offer in terms of a potential drug. Genes that prevent people from getting disease would point more directly to drugs, he said. It seems simple, but it's not easy to change a hulking industry or the minds of biotech gurus who have their businesses aimed at studying disease genes. A target is any part of a cell that is found to be vulnerable to a drug. Lexicon is a company in The Woodlands, Texas, that has created a database of more than 100,000 so-called knockout mice, that is, mice with certain genes that are inactivated.
Researchers use the mice as models for drug experiments.
But Olsen insisted that it's time for researchers and physicians to look at things in a new way. Studying healthy people is an essentially unexplored approach, and healthy genes are probably plentiful, he said. And it seems it's time for a sea change in an industry with a 99.9 percent inefficiency rate, according the Stephen Friend, the CEO of Rosetta Inpharmatics , who also spearheaded the meeting. Most discoveries, he explained, are found while looking for something completely different. For example, statins, drugs that lower cholesterol, were found while trying to treat cows for worms.