“There’s such a massive amount of data being generated, dumped into the public domain. The real question of the 21st century is, who are going to be the right kinds of groups to integrate that information in ways that best informs the biology at the earliest stages?"
Those are the words of Eric Schadt, a mathematician by training who joined Rosetta Inpharmatics in 1999 and currently has been appointed as Chief Scientific Officer in the the next-generation sequencing company Pacific Biosciences. Schadt’s groundbreaking studies on disease pathways and genome data integration have drawn plaudits from the scientific community.
Obviously, integration of different data types is not a trivial task at all, given the heterogeneity of available data across dispersed databases. However, adoption of an integrative approach in drug discovery pipeline by pharma industry seems to become of high priority; this alternative strategy would most probably help pharmaceutical companies get out of the mud of low productivity and high rates of attrition. Currently, clinical safety and efficacy are two major issues to which almost 90 percent of drug failures are attributed. Thus, integrative bioinformatics and network biology may offer promising solutions to overcome these major issues in the near future.