Flipping the odds of drug development success through human genomics

Drug development depends on accurately identifying molecular targets that both play a causal role in a disease and are amenable to pharmacological action by small molecule drugs or bio-therapeutics, such as monoclonal antibodies. Errors in drug target specification contribute to the extremely high rates of drug development failure. Integrating knowledge of genes that encode druggable targets with those that influence susceptibility to common disease has the potential to radically improve the probability of drug development success.