Worldwide, considerable research efforts are being directed toward the discovery of novel drugs against human diseases. Enabling technologies have provided much knowledge about disease mechanisms, extremely sensitive assay techniques, and expanding compound libraries, and much of the information resides in computer databases. Despite this massive technological effort the number of truly new drugs available to treat disease is not that great, yet the information may well exist about them. It could be argued that the problem is not the quantity of information, nor necessarily its quality, but the ability to assimilate and act upon it. New developments in software technology, changes in the way in which users expect to interact and use computers, and the opening up and globalization of information networks will impact greatly on the pharmaceutical industry. This paper discusses these developments and provides a somewhat far-reaching vision of a future where computers play a more fundamental role in screening for new drugs.
References
1.
The Network with Smarts. (1994). ByteOctober:50.
2.
Agents of Change. (1995). ByteMarch:90.
3.
Design of a Lifetime. (1994). ByteOctober:103.
4.
Assets in Wonderland. (1995). ByteJuly:l 11.
5.
Collins, M.A. (1993). Empiricism strikes back—The role of Neural Networks in biotechnology. Bio/Technology11(2):163.
6.
Collins, M.A. (1993). Neural networks—a new tool for drug discovery? Invited paper. Rapid Screening Strategies for the Discovery of Novel Drug Candidates, London.
7.
Brown, M., Harris, C. (1994). Neurofuzzy Adaptive Modelling and Control. Prentice Hall, London.
8.
Okada, H., Masuoka, R., Kawamura, A. (1993). Knowledge based neural network using fuzzy logic to initialise a multilayer neural networks and interpret post learning results. Fujitsu Sci. Technol. J.29:217.
9.
Clark, D.E., Jones, G., Willet, P., Glen, R.C., Kenny, P.W. (1994). Pharmacopheric pattern matching in files of three dimensional chemical structures: comparison of conformational-searching algorithms for flexible searching. J. Chem. Inform. Comput. Sci.34:197.
10.
Moody's Evolving Help Desk. (1995). ByteFebruary:76.
11.
Kay, A. (1990). User Interface. A Personal View. The Art of Human Computer Interface Design.Apple Computer, Cupertino, CA. Addison Wesley, Menlo Park, CA.
12.
Weinstein, J.N., Kohn, K.W., Grever, M.R., Viswanadhan, V.N., Rubinstein, L.V., Monks, A.P., Scudiero, D.A., Welch, L., Koutsoukos, A.D., Chiausa, A.J., Paull, K.D. (1992). Neural computing in cancer drug development: Predicting mechanism of action. Science258:447.
13.
Holland, S. (1995). The application of neural technology and other data mining tools to high throughput screening. In Abstracts of the First Annual SBS Meeting, Philadelphia177-188.
