Word: processing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Once scientists have decoded these instructions--a process already well under way--they should have a better understanding of precisely what happens, down to the molecules within individual cells, when the body malfunctions. And, says Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Research Institute, "if you understand the genetic basis of a disease, then you can predict what protein it produces and set about developing a drug to block...
...they've been intervening at the level of symptoms--the last, visible step in a complex cascade of biochemical events. And they have done it largely by trial and error--finding new medicines in exotic plant extracts, for example, or looking for chemical compounds that resemble existing drugs. The process is so woefully inefficient that the drugs currently available target only 500 or so different proteins in the body, out of the 30,000 or so we're made of. Says Collins: "We've beaten those targets to death...
...escalating arms race, so that as soon as drug developers launch a new weapon--an antibiotic, for example--their microbial foes respond by shoring up their own defenses. Sometimes bacteria and parasites undergo random mutations that spontaneously confer resistance. More frequently, they acquire survival-enhancing characteristics in the process of exchanging DNA with other microbes that have already developed resistance...
...process of discovering antimicrobials should speed up, thanks to the rapid sequencing of the genomes of disease-causing organisms. Among the latest conquests are the bacteria responsible for causing syphilis and leprosy. The genome of the parasite that causes malaria is also beginning to yield its secrets, including the exact genetic mutations that confer chloroquine resistance. Scientists are beginning to exploit what they know about the parasite's life cycle after it invades the red blood cells of the human body. Daniel Goldberg, a malaria researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., is trying to figure...
...that's about to change. With the mapping of the genome--the twisted double strand of DNA that carries the instructions for making every cell in the human body--the process by which new drugs are developed is being turned upside down. Trial and error, which is how medicines have been discovered for the past 100 years (and for millenniums before that), is yielding to drugs by design. Increasingly scientists, armed with blueprints for our genes, can identify the individual molecules that make us susceptible to a particular disease. With that information--and some high-speed silicon-age machinery--they...