Did you know that there's a revolution going on in drug discovery? We're talking about inventive therapeutic approaches to preventing and fighting disease. The way scientists are thinking about new drugs has changed dramatically in recent years, spurred by advances in genetics, structural biology, and biotechnology. Since the human genome was first sequenced 15 years ago, excitement has been building about precision medicine—the idea that treatments can be personalized to target an individual's unique genetic make up. Some of the biological differences between one person and another are explained by DNA, but we now know that gene activity can also be affected by epigenetic changes that occur in response to environmental factors, and even our own microbiomes, the bacteria that colonize our bodies. Precision medicine needs to consider all of these factors, which means it requires a lot of data crunching.

Explore the evolution of therapeutic drugs from roughly 60,000 years ago to the present and imagine what might be in store in the future. The history of disease and scientists' drive to stop it is a fascinating lens on humanity. Just this year the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery of drugs from natural sources to treat parasitic infections like malaria. And scientists can also engineer proteins and antibodies—called biologics—or even coax cells to treat disease. Think about how the world would look today without antibiotics, vaccines to prevent smallpox and polio, and antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV.

Learn about the promise of precision medicine and discuss some of its challenges. What are the ethics of allocating resources to treat very rare diseases? What are some of the regulatory and financial barriers to precision drug development?

A biochemist and physician whose research contributions have included major advances in understanding the chemical basis of vision, Thomas P. Sakmar, M.D., is professor and head of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology and Signal Transduction at Rockefeller University. In his lab, Dr. Sakmar uses genetic, biochemical and biophysical methods to learn how signals from outside a cell are relayed across its membrane and into the cell interior, where they can elicit a response in a process called signal transduction. Much of his work focuses on molecules known as heptahelical receptors that are key to a wide range of signal transduction pathways, including those involved in vision and taste perception, glucose metabolism, the brain's response to dopamine and the ability of the AIDS virus to enter human cells.