The new science of whole genomics will fundamentally change how pharmaceutical companies pursue the vital challenge of new and better drugs. Target discovery, lead compound identification, pharmacology, toxicology and clinical trials are likely to merge with the science of bioinformatics into a powerful system for developing new pharmaceutical agents. It will be possible to simulate the action of new molecules or therapeutic programs against diverse metabolic pathways prior to preclinical testing. Thus, a paradigm of cyberpharmaceutical testing will be available to the industry, speeding the selection of promising new agents, eliminating products that are likely to exhibit toxicity, and reducing the formidable costs and risks associated with the current paradigm of drug development.

Istrail will report on the Celera’s design of a whole genome shotgun assembler and its application to the sequencing of the Drosophila and Human genomes. He will also present some of the major emerging computational challenges of the above paradigm in the exciting new areas of proteomics, structural genomics, expression profiling, SNPs and pharmacogenomics.