Discovery informatics: its evolving role in drug discovery

Drug discovery and development is a highly complex process requiring the generation of very large amounts of data and information. Currently this is a largely unmet informatics challenge. The current approaches to building information and knowledge from large amounts of data has been addressed in cases where the types of data are largely homogeneous or at the very least well-defined. However, we are on the verge of an exciting new era of drug discovery informatics in which methods and approaches dealing with creating knowledge from information and information from data are undergoing a paradigm shift. The needs of this industry are clear: Large amounts of data are generated using a variety of innovative technologies and the limiting step is accessing, searching and integrating this data. Moreover, the tendency is to move crucial development decisions earlier in the discovery process. It is crucial to address these issues with all of the data at hand, not only from current projects but also from previous attempts at drug development. What is the future of drug discovery informatics? Inevitably, the integration of heterogeneous, distributed data are required. Mining and integration of domain specific information such as chemical and genomic data will continue to develop. Management and searching of textual, graphical and undefined data that are currently difficult, will become an integral part of data searching and an essential component of building information- and knowledge-bases.