Preparing for the new millennium

Since being introduced to the field of drug discovery at Zeneca Pharmaceuticals in 1991, it has become apparent to me that a blizzard of revolutionary novel approaches has swept through the pharmaceutical industry. Now, the discovery process has become completely transformed and the race to develop commercially successful drugs is now taking place in a very different realm. Rapid advances in automation, combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening (HTS), genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics appear to be principally responsible for driving such a rapidly evolving discovery process. In these exciting times for pharmaceutical R&D, it is a delight for me to take over the Editor's reins of Drug Discovery Today.