The major reason for the elevated costs of drug development in the pharmaceutical indus￾try is the high attrition rate. Only a minority of molecules entering the clinical phase makes
it to the market, and one of the increasing causes for drug failures in recent years is “target
failure.” Hence investments in better validated targets is the key to reduce attrition rates
and certainly also the most cost effective. However, in most indications, validated targets
are rare and the highly validated ones are also extremely competitive. This is particularly
true for oncology, and therefore we focused mainly on oncology-related methods. The
identi fi cation of innovative new targets is the real bottleneck of modern drug development
and the challenge will be to identify new disease-associated mechanisms and spotting “drug￾gable” targets while minimizing side effects.