In the past, chemists generally developed new Pharmaceuticals by tweaking the structures of compounds with known therapeutic effects. In recent years, however, they have started to collaborate with life scientists on techniques of rational drug design that accelerate the discovery process. The work involves the design and optimization of small organic molecules, ideally on the basis of information derived from structural genomics - the identification of proteins' structures. Karsten Fjarstedt, marketing director for laboratory separations purification systems at Amersham Biosciences, explains the differences between the structural genomics approach to drug discovery and the more traditional method. Using the structural genomics approach, he says, "You try to purify as many proteins as possible expressed from a certain gene and identify their structures. You then compare with structures of proteins known to take part in a disease process." The theory is that it is likely that proteins of a similar structure have similar behavior in disease patterns. That means, he continues, that "structural genomics has more of a shotgun approach than the traditional method of drug discovery."
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