Identification of therapeutic drug target genes by "genome-wide" expression profile analysis on animal models of human disease

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The advent of Genome Science had markedly changed the way how the life science research including.medical investigation is conducted; thus, "systematic" and "integrated" approach is required (so called "genome-wide" survey). Now, genome-wide transcriptome and proteomics scanning are becoming feasible. The stream of "Genome -Trariscriptome -Proteomics" is logical, and in each aspect approaches for functional genomics are now pursued at a high pace; however, still standardized approach is immature or lacking. Very recently, novel genome-based technology of cDNA microarray, DNA chips has been innovated and immediately applied for the medical researches. The cDNA microarray or DNA-chip technology allows expression monitoring of hundreds and thousands of genes simultaneously and provides a format for,identifying genes as well as changes in their activity. Microarrays can be constructed from specific cDNA clones of interest, a cDNA library, or a select number of open reading fragments from a genome sequencing database to allow a large-scale functional analysis of expressed sequences. Analyzing disease states and drug treatment with the new tools of genomics such as DNA microarray enables the identification of drug targets and should improve the odds of developing useful therapeutics, thereby it would provide a new approach to investigations in developmental biology. As a model system to verify the system, we examined the progression of GN in a rat model of anti-glomerular basement membrane serum-induced nephritis. cDNA microarray analysis identified disease-related, differentially expressed gene, which appear to be potentially important therapeutic targets.