Following Old Comfortable Formulas

Undaunted, the molecular biologists, who have founded many Biotech companies, argue that once you have identified a transcript or a gene product coded by it that is specifically expressed in humans or in some disease model, and you have detected some change in this gene product level or activity with the disease, then you have a real, nice drug target. 

Between these two views lies reality, and when companies get fed up by being told that they caimot go beyond a physiological target like insulin, they embrace the molecular biologists view. Once they have been burned a few times with these only molecular biology targets, they start to paddle back. Meanwhile, a number of companies make it, and a number of companies go under. 

If you ask senior people in Pharma companies what they would like to achieve, they might say they would like to repeat success. Therefore, it is extremely important in every drug company to know the history of successful projects. For the most part their history is in their company s chemical library.  

The chemical library of a company comprises the real and tangible history of all the projects they have worked on, and all the compounds they made to hit those projects targets. So, if you work at Hoffmann La Roche which invented Valium and many other benzodiazepine drugs, then 

That is, how many receptors, receptor subtypes, their anatomical distribution, and how many of these insulin receptors are hit to produce the desired therapeutic effect when we add insulin with simple replacement therapy  

---