New Path to Cancer Drugs Opened
Researchers at Harvard have built a library of genetic information on kinases - enzymes associated with "proteins, lipids, sugars, nucleosides, and other cellular components." Many different diseases are the result of some malfunction of these enzymes, but most often its cancer.
Greater understanding of the genetic makeup of these enzymes gives drug makers new targets for drug development.
This collection [of genetic information] is unique because clones in the collection represent protein kinases as well as non-protein kinases, are fully sequenced verified, full-length, and can be sub-cloned by recombination based methodologies.
Er...okay. Suffice it to say that this is valuable information that drug manufacturers didn't have before. Harvard accomplished this work by "mining public databases," using "high-throughput cloning" methods, and "automation." My translation: they used the Internet, fast computation, and robots.
All of these tools are on "Mr. Spock's chessboard" - all are subject to exponential improvement over time.