Axiom: Going native

Advances in combinatorial chemistry have helped drug hunters overcome the historical challenge in drug discovery: an inadequate supply of diverse compounds. But along with that progress has come the dilemma of how to screen millions of compounds efficiently to find new therapeutic candidates

Existing radio-ligand binding high throughput screening has accelerated the work, but it reveals no functional/biological information. Other technologies are attempting to screen huge numbers of molecules using genetically engineered systems, such as transfected cells, or ultra high throughput screening. These systems provide some biological information, but because the target gene isn't in its natural cell environment, it's difficult to know if the target gene is behaving as it would in its native cell type...