8° CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE MEDICINA INTERNA
del Hospital de Clínicas
Buenos Aires, 28-31 agosto 2000

CONSEQUENCES OF GENOMICS ON PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH

GüNTER STOCK

Board of Executive Directors Schering AG. Berlin. Germany

Knowing that we are living in ageing societies and that the vast majority of all diseases is still not causally treatable one can easily imagine that there are major challenges for our future health care systems.
The dynamics within the pharmaceutical industry are driven by both the ever-increasing medical need for improved diagnostics and therapeutics and in particular preventive treatments in fields like oncology, cardiovascular and CNS diseases on the one side and the newest developments in molecular biosciences with the great hope to come up with proper solutions for the aforementioned challenges on the other side. Hence, it is mandatory not only to intensify our search for novel drug targets, but also to turn our research activities into finding value adding drugs. Research in the field of molecular medicine – and here especially in gene technology, genomics and proteomics together with bioinformatics – is giving us already today but even more so in the future access to e.g. completely new targets, new methods in gene diagnosis as well as promising approaches towards gene therapy which will – if successful – further increase our ability to create new diagnostic and therapeutic principles.