[Impacts of modern biology on drug discovery]

Drug discovery has been improved greatly by series of new ideas and new technologies as well as new approaches emerging in the postgenomic era. On the one hand, the theoretics of drug discovery become more comprehensive and more profound as the development of numerous new disciplines such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabonomics, bioinformatics and system biology; on the other hand, the pathways for new drug discovery are broadened by the continuous improvement of technological platforms including computer-aided drug design, high throughput screening, high content screening, biochip, transgenic and RNAi technology. Based on the recent advances on the modern biology, in this article, we specially reviewed the impacts of modern biology on the process of drug discovery.