Market Insight - MicroRNA discoveries have huge implications
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
There was a time when the Human Genome Project seemed likely to deliver every specific target the drug industry would ever need, and specific drug targeting was deemed the best way forward. Certainly it yielded data on hundreds of hitherto unknown proteins, ripe for investigation as therapeutic targets – but it now appears that this was actually far from being the end of the story. Hidden among the previously unfashionable realm of "non-coding" sequences lay what many believe are the true master-regulators of biological systems, opening up a whole new area for pharmaceutical R&D and one that seriously challenges our preconceptions regarding the specificity of drug targeting.