Future Trends: More Quality than Quantity

, den 10. September 2003

The past years have seen tremendous advances in the areas of bioinformatics, mathematics and screening. Whereas high throughput screening (HTS) was the achievement of the nineties, high content screening is now on its way, as explained by our author Véronique
Timmermans in her article on a very promising approach to meaningful qualitative high-value data analysis (starting page 28).
The real excitement however is in the areas of Bioinformatics, software development and mathematics as well as the development of selective algorithms. Only these tools can provide the answer to the ultimate, decisive question; how can the one and only successful target, the single one that will become a new active drug, be fished out of a huge sea of data? An increasing number of companies are discontinuing their attempts to solve this problem in house, and are turning to 3rd parties. Conversely, increasing numbers of companies are developing suitable software solutions that leave no wishes open with regard to flexibility, reproducibility of the results and customisation.

It is not only the actual finding of the new drug that counts, though. Time and cost are also a substantial problem. The article on Fourier Transform Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry
(FT-ICR MS) starting page 26 shows how savings can be made in drug discovery.
The time-to-market and cost factors were also the subject of a panel discussion at this year’s DDT in Boston, in which leading representatives from the biotechnological and pharmaceutical sectors participated. It became clear that in the drug discovery process a selection must be made even earlier than up till now, to avoid spending many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a supposedly very promising drug development project, before simply having to ditch it! Technologies such as ADME-Tox, biomarkers and mass spectrometry point the way to more productivity.
To sum up. The trend is away from aimless high throughput screening towards high content screening, a trend that was in fact already apparent at LabAutomation in Palm Springs at the beginning of this year. The further development of bioinformatics clearly faces new challenges on the way to reaching “more quality than quantity”. This is the future of biotechnology.

- Rosemarie Asang-Soergel-