Chemogenomics: Serendipity on a Large Scale
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
To eliminate a bottle neck in target validation, pharmaceutical firms are turning to a new model known as chemogenomics, the use of small molecule drugs as probes to tease out a phenotypic response from multiple poorly-understood targets. One of the most ambitious efforts to date, Amphora Discovery Corp., a spin-out of lab-on-a-chip firm Caliper Technologies, was founded in September to build a database detailing the interactions of as many as 4000-12000 biological targets with half a million compounds.