The Future for Genomic Medicine in Inflammatory Diseases

Identifying novel drug targets in the pharmaceutical industry pushes the boundaries of disease understanding and maintains a competitive arena. Finding new ways to drug these targets may allow patients to derive greater treatment responses. A number of novel technologies have fallen in and out of favor with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies over the past three decades or so. Antisense, RNA interference, gene therapy, and microRNAs have been evaluated in the larger companies in different therapeutic settings and with varying degrees of commitment and success. This chapter looks through the relatively short history of applying these technologies in different disease areas and how each technology rose and fell out of favor after significant investment; looks at the current state of the field and how out of this body of work the future looks brighter; and finally reviews the investment in inflammatory diseases and what may be required to convert promise into drugs.