Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for health and human services, called the initiatives "spectacular" and said agency officials were "fundamentally reorganizing the way they attack dread maladies, re-engineering clinical research and developing new pathways to discovery".
The Molecular Libraries Initiative is one of the initial projects developed under the New Pathways to Discovery roadmap theme.
In addition to the work done at the NCGC, other elements in the Roadmap's theme of "new pathways to discovery" include biological pathways, structural biology, bioinformatics, and nanomedicine.
The Roadmap identifies the most compelling opportunities in three arenas: new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future, and reengineering the clinical research enterprise.
The second of these pathways to discovery is a more novel approach of generating and then sifting MPS results as the raw material to allow the generation of clinical hypotheses, which are in turn used to design clinical experiments to discover the phenotype that is associated with that genotype.
Although NIH has begun a roadmap to improve biomedical research into the 21st century, nowhere does the plan mention comparative medicine and the importance of veterinary involvement, which would certainly fit into its goals of promoting interdisciplinary research and new pathways to discovery (33).
This review explores the pathway leading to discovery of these genetic effects, the impact of these genetic loci on diabetes risk, the potential mechanisms of action of the genes to alter glucose homeostasis, and the limitations of these studies in defining the role of genetics in this important disease.
Although this workflow method [ 59] is not yet available as a standalone software program, it outlines the pathway to new discoveries using advanced instrumentation and database queries.
We provide a summary of some of the recent work in this area, focusing on how the integration of different kinds of complementary data, and analysis of biological networks and pathways can lead to discovery of robust, specific and useful biomarkers of disease and how these methods can help shed light on the mechanisms and etiology of the diseases being studied.
