Where BioInformatics Fits In

From Metroactive News & Issues:

"The flip side of the long development time and $800 million price tag attached to new drugs is that pharmaceutical companies are always looking for ways to speed things up and cut costs; and that's where bioinformatics comes in.

Drug discovery is becoming increasingly reliant on information. Whether it is DNA sequences of potential drug targets, analysis of protein structures or teasing out the differences in gene expression between people who are sick and people who are well, there is information that needs to be gathered, annotated, organized, analyzed and stored. In addition, companies are looking for ways to automate these processes in order to churn through the vast number of drug leads, DNA sequences and other targets that need to be interrogated. "