Digitising the cell to discover new drugs

THE current state of medical technology has meant that despite there being some 20,000 genes in the human genome, the standard procedure for drug discovery is to laboriously measure the effect of a test drug on a single or pair of genes one by one.

Each individual or pair of genes has to be examined, which would theoretically mean conducting an excess of 20,000 tests for individual genes, and an additional 400 million tests for pairs of genes.

The trial-and-error approaches have been summarised by Engine Biosciences co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Lu as: brute-force hacking or old-fashioned quests.