The development of a new drug candidate has traditionally been a long and expensive process, in which a molecule undergoes several stages of research (both pre-clinical and clinical) before being approved for commercialization. Scientific progress has revolutionized the pharmaceutical industry and reshaped the processes by which new drugs are discovered, investigated, and developed. However, nowadays, since the patents on many drugs are expiring and their biosimilars are entering the market, efficient ways to probe their alleged bioequivalency to the reference drug, are in high need (León-Cachón and Barrera-Saldaña, 2012). For both scenarios, genomics is aiding to accelerate the development of new drugs either by identifying «drugable» cellular targets in the first case, or by genetically identifying volunteers with normalization purposes for optimizing bioequivalence studies, as to choose only normal metabolizers for the drug being evaluated, so that by minimizing inter-individual variability, less volunteers are needed to reach reliable comparative results (León- Cachón and Barrera-Saldaña, 2012).
