Translational Medicine: Application of Omics for Drug Target Discovery and Validation

Drug research and development is a long, expensive and risky process. The novel omics technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabonomics) and systems biology have brought unprecedented abilities to screen cells at the gene, transcript, protein, metabolite and their interaction network level in searching of novel drug targets, elucidating the primary mechanism-of-action of a drug, understanding side effects in unanticipated off-target interaction, validating existing drug candidates and finding new potential therapeutic applications for an established drug, hence to facilitate the translation from bench to bedside. This chapter provides an overview of recent applications of various omics technologies and systems biology to drug development.