One of the best ways to prepare for pharmacogenomics, advises Ashton, is to streamline your research using those tools. Russ Granzow , director of business development at Orchid Biocomputer Inc., Princeton, N.J., sees a need for life scientists with an interest in improving search engines and data-mining tools. He believes researchers will conduct upward of four billion genotypes over the next three to five years. The technology is already in place to churn out those samples, he says, but the vast dataset that will result from it will pose a huge challenge to scientists hoping to analyze it. Mass. Kauffman cites a yeast study his company is conducting.
Specific drugs inhibit the synthesis of the yeast equivalent to cholesterol.
To better understand the mechanism of these anticholesterol agents, and to design new drugs that can circumvent resistance, researchers measured the expression of RNA levels after exposure to a particular drug. Programmers then designed software to organize the data and present it to researchers in an intelligible form. Then they grouped RNAs with similar base sequences. They also linked the RNA sequences to a biochemical pathway database. Now you have biologically meaningful information, and you can then go to a yeast strain that is resistant to the drug.