Dna Chips And The Pharmaceutical Industry

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shelves at the local pharmacy. The effect is that the production of a new drug is almost like a guessing game that may or may not produce any profit. A Company may have a long list of chemicals that could make possible drugs to treat a specific affliction, but by the time they narrow the list down, and do the necessary research and testing, they may have already spent possibly millions of dollars. In the end they may not even be left with a viable drug to market.

BACKGROUND

This section is designed to educate the reader on some of the background information needed to understand the nature of DNA chips, as well as to appreciate the benefits the chips could bring to pharmaceutical research. This section consists of the following sections: The Definition of DNA Chips, and The Pharmaceutical Industry Today.

The Definition of DNA Chips

DNA chips bear an amazing resemblance to microchips. DNA chips are basically pieces of silicon that are layered with a dense ...

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being tested differs by even a single nucleotide from the standard version. When there may be millions of nucleotides in a given sample, being able to identify one that doesn't match is a tremendous feat.
The technology that spawned the DNA chip became a reality in the early 1990's, after the commencement of the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP was started in 1990 and is one of the most ambitious endeavors ever undertaken by mankind. It is a government funded project whose two major goals are to identify the 80,000 to 100,000 genes in human DNA, and to determine the nucleotide sequences of the 3 billion or so chemical bases that make-up human DNA. The genes in human DNA largely ...

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