The Proteomics Challenge
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
The fact that proteomic diversity is most likely several logs greater than genomic diversity is only one reason why moving from gene expression-based analyses to proteomics-based drug development presents a daunting challenge. The large issues go well beyond protein isolation and characterization: Genomics simply doesn't tell you how proteins function in vivo, and companies are just now beginning to amass and integrate the tools to correlate protein structure and function. In many ways, proteomics heralds the second coming of rational drug design, enabled now by high-throughput tools and the algorithms of computational biology. But whether structure-guided drug development will prove to be efficient or cost-effective remains to be seen.