DNA CHIPS AND THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

DNA CHIPS AND THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY INTRODUCTION When future historians look back on the greatest scientific advancements of the 20th century, they will without a doubt focus on only three events: the Apollo Moon landing, the invention of the microprocessor, and possibly the greatest scientific endeavor yet, genomics, the science of identifying genes and how they work in humans. It is possibly not a total coincidence then that two of this centuries greatest advancements have …

…are just a small percent of the standards a drug candidate must meet before being approved for human testing. Once all of the necessary criteria are met, then the drug can go into the final phase of testing, human tests. By the time a manufacturer has reached this phase, they have already spent millions of dollars. The average time spent going from a drug's discovery to a market launch could be anywhere from 4 to 12 years.