In 1996, all existing therapeutic
The drug discovery process
3
agents interacted with an estimated 500 drug targets [1], but the sequencing
of the human genome revealed about 25000–30000 protein-coding genes [2,
3]. If one takes into account splicing and post-translational modifications, it
can be estimated that there must be more than 100000 functionally differ-
ent proteins assuming 25000 protein-coding genes [4],