This method of testing new drug ideas against many thousand compounds - High Throughput Screening (HTS) - is likened to searching for a very small needle in a very large haystack.

BBC: Science of life in the economy

High-throughput screening uses robots to test the actions of thousands of compounds against a molecular disease target (itself identified by genomics).

FORBES: A hail of silver bullets

Instead of making drugs, they would use the high-tech tools of gene chips, high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry (the rapid mixing and matching of chemicals) and bioinformatics (software that analyzes data)--to develop entirely different compounds.

FORBES: Breaking a Sweat