Drug discovery in the next millennium

Selection and validation of novel molecular targets have become of paramoun t importance in light of the plethora of new potential therapeutic drug tar gets that have emerged from human gene sequencing. In response to this revo lution within the pharmaceutical industry, the development of high-throughp ut methods in both biology and chemistry has been necessitated. This review addresses these technological advances as well as several new areas that h ave been created by necessity to deal with this new paradigm, such as bioin formatics, cheminformatics, and functional genomics. With many of these key components of future drug discovery now in place, it is possible to map ou t a critical path for this process that will be used into the new millenniu m.