| Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are under immense pressures to produce a steady stream of innovative, well-differentiated drugs at reduced costs. Currently it takes an estimated seven to ten years to develop and market a drug at costs measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In simple terms, drug discovery requires the identification of a disease, knowledge of the disease mechanism and identification of a target (point of intervention). The human genome project is expected to lead to the identification of approximately 100,000 targets that will require evaluation against many compound libraries to compare gene sequences and structure. This represents a very time-consuming process and a major bottleneck in the drug discovery process as millions of compounds can be screened for each target. Speeding up the Drug Discovery Process Novel discovery and validation technologies can expand the hit rate for promising compounds in the pipeline, and expedite their progress through to market. The introduction of microarrays and lab-on-a-chip technologies has already revolutionized the drug discovery process. Where once it took the effort of a single chemist to view anything from one to 12 gene variations at a time, microarrays can view thousands in the same time frame. Now, nanotechnology promises to exponentially increase even the volume of microarrays by working at a level far smaller than conventional microarrays. Nanotechnology Enhancing The Drug Discovery Process Nanotechnology can also enhance the drug discovery process, through miniaturization, automation, speed and reliability of assays. Although at an embryonic stage of development, nano-enabled drugs are already bringing clinical benefits to thousands of patients Nano-enabled Drug Discovery Technologies and Products An important consequence of todays approach to drug discovery is that more lead molecules are being discovered for diverse targets, giving the medicinal chemist more scope to find a candidate molecule. Yet the probability of success of launching a candidate molecule into the market remains basically unchanged at around 8 percent, and the perception is that the time to market is not decreasing as might be expected with greater automation. Numerous problem areas remain: · Current methodologies for compound synthesis · Storage and retrieval are inefficient and inadequate · Better information is needed to improve target selection and validation · More predictive screens are essential · More emphasis must be placed on acquiring good ADMET data earlier in the discovery process · Novel screening methodologies are needed that dramatically increase throughputs and reduce reagent consumption. The Role of Nanotechnology in Drug Discovery It is becoming clear that many of the important solutions will be nanotechnological in nature. This is because the size range that holds the most interest in drug discovery is more or less the same as that which defines nanotechnology from 100 nm down to the atomic level (approximately 0.2 nm). Nanotechnology cannot provide the ultimate solutions to all these problems. However, it is becoming clear that many of the tools developed to pursue nanotechnology and nanoscience will have important roles in drug discovery. This report highlights seven nanotechnologies that NanoMarkets believes will make a serious contribution to this search: · Atomic Force Microscopy · Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope · Surface Plasmon Resonance · Nano Mass Spectroscopy · Dip-pen Nanolithography · Nano-Arrays · Quantum Dots | 
