Modeling drug action in the mouse with knockouts and RNA interference

Abstract

The sequencing of the human genome has created both great opportunity and great risk for the pharmaceutical industry. Although the genome codes for all potential host targets for future drug development, the scale of new targets could result in decreased efficiencies owing to efforts expended on poor targets. Effective methods are required to model drug action in vivo in a mammal before costly development efforts begin and we review mouse knockouts and RNA interference as two modeling methods.