In the past, researchers in the biopharmaceutical industry have often concentrated on manufacturing these proteins. Now they've become more capable of controlling the genetic machinery responsible for turning out those proteins.

Why? Because of the Human Genome Project. The project began in 1990 and should wind up by 2005. Its purpose is to identify and sequence each of the 100,000 or so genes that make up human DNA.

The harvest of knowledge that has already resulted is helping scientists to understand which genes are linked to which diseases. Slight differences in genes from person to person may dictate who gets breast cancer and who doesn't, who suffers Alzheimer's and who remains mentally intact.

The writer of a front page story in the March 4, 1999, Wall Street Journal declared, "In recent years, scientists have discovered that these tiny genetic differences that reside inside or near genes are sprinkled at regular intervals along the vast DNA molecule, like road signs and mile markers on a long stretch of highway."

One possibility, then, is to make drugs that interact with our DNA. A drug might, for example, activate a gene responsible for making a healing protein. Other drugs might short-circuit the gene-ordered production of harmful proteins. Still another possibility is to smuggle a gene into a cell so that the cell makes a protein product that it hasn't made, one that's crucial to health and life.

In an interview with Explore:, Charles Decedue, executive director of the Higuchi Biosciences Center at KU, talked about the promise of future pharmaceuticals, ones that may be tailored precisely to our genetic makeup, and the changes in technology necessary to take us there.

To understand some parts of the interview to follow will require an understanding of how drugs make it to the marketplace, a process that today costs, on average, about $300 million.

Drugs to Market: Step by Step

Drug prospects, called leads, are identified in a number of ways. Sometimes an investigation begins when a medicinal chemist, following a hint from folklore or from the use of an herbal remedy by residents of a poor nation, grinds up plants and discovers that the grounds seem to have some disease-fighting power.

At other times, pharmaceutical chemists discover prospects by tinkering with molecular models on their computer screens.

This step of selecting a molecule you think might show eventual promise as a drug is called the drug discovery process.

Trouble is, the molecule is often tangled up with a whole bunch of other molecules. You've got to cut it out of the herd. This is called chemical separation.

Also required is drug analysis -- a process of making visible the specific chemical you're interested in so that it can be studied and tracked.

At this point, you have to address two issues: drug efficacy and drug delivery.

Determining drug efficacy comes down to figuring out whether the drug is effective against the disease being studied. Will it work in a testing situation -- in a test tube or a petri dish and then in an animal model?

Delivery requires making the compound adequately water soluble. (If it can't dissolve, it's in trouble, given that the human body is 70 percent water.) Delivery also requires being able to smuggle the drug through many barriers in the body that can stop a drug from reaching its destination. There are destructive enzymes in your spit and gut, for example. Even if the drug molecule sneaks past those, it's still got to make it through the bloodstream to the organ or tissue that's the target for its action. And then it's got to cross the cell membrane -- a sort of porous, rubbery wall.

All along the way, you track the amount of the drug available as the body breaks down the drug compound, because you want to be sure there's still enough at the end of the line. This, too, is drug analysis.

Maybe, in the end, the substance can actually throttle a bacterium, like one of today's super penicillins. Maybe, like one of the new antidepressants, it can make an important chemical available to the nerve cells of the brain. If that's so, and if the drug is also safe and can stay on the shelf for a while without breaking down, you've turned a chemical into a useful drug.

Ever since the Higuchi Biosciences Center was set up back in 1983, University of Kansas scientists have been involved with all these steps -- though drug analysis and delivery are its specialties.

Now we hear from Charles. (Click for the interview)

--Roger Martin