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The rapid evolution of drug discovery science, fuelled by combinatorial librarybased synthesis programmes, has led to increased pressure on the drug safety evaluation process. Once potential drugs have passed the primary biological screening procedures, losses of drug candidate compounds from the product development pipeline (known asattrition’) need to be minimized. Hence, there is an intensive search for new analytical technologies that will maximize eæciency of lead compound selection based both on eæcacy and safety and will minimize overall attrition rates. Current bioanalytical approaches include measurements of responses of living systems to drugs either at the genetic level or at the level of expression of cellular proteins, using so-called genomic and proteomic methods respectively. At present both genomics and proteomics are expensive and labour-intensive, yet potentially are powerful tools for …