The pharmaceutical and biotech industry has the unusual distinction of being one of the fastest-moving, and slowest-moving, sectors of the chemical engineering industries. On the one hand, companies are charged with developing treatments for a quickly expanding array of diseases and conditions. Advances in genomics and bioinformatics are enabling researchers to identify more numerous and complex targets than ever before. And increasingly powerful tools, such as high-throughput screening methodologies and microarrays, are providing exhaustive amounts of new information on biological materials and processes.
On the other hand, pharmaceutical firms are also unusually constrained in their ability to turn research findings into manufacturable solutions for the consumer market. "Drug discovery is not the rate-limiting step," says Ajaz Hussain, deputy director of the Office of PharmaceuticalScience in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). "Combinatorial chemistry, highthroughput screening and other methods are providing so many new potentially drug-like molecules that need to be evaluated and developed - and those activities are rate limiting." Adds Arthur D. Little analyst Roland Andersson, "Some companies say they can screen one million assays in a couple of weeks - but what do they do with all that information?" It's like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks. "Of 10,000 leads, maybe one will become a drug".
