The completion of the sequence of the human genome was predicted by many to be the start of a revolution in medicine, and this month, Kramer and Cohen evaluate functional genomics approaches for prioritizing the most promising new drug targets. Nuclear receptors are one important target class, as highlighted by Gronemeyer, Gustafsson and Laudet, who review their biology and pharmacology. Moving further down the pipeline, two articles focus on making compound selection more efficient, thereby improving the success rate of drug development. Kitchen and colleagues describe computational screening approaches that involve small-molecule docking methods, and Gardner, Walsh and Almarsson discuss the importance of characterizing and optimizing the chemical and material properties of candidate drugs. Early indications of whether a candidate drug is acting as intended would be valuable in clinical development, and tools for cardiovascular imaging that can provide such information about drugs for atherosclerosis, and also allow earlier disease diagnosis, are discussed by Choudhury, Fuster and Fayad. Clinical development is also a focus of this month's Perspective, in which Whitehead considers how 'stopping rules' in clinical trials — which are intended to lead to the halting of a trial if a drug is deemed unsafe, or to making it generally available as rapidly as possible if it is efficacious — might best be used. Finally, this issue is accompanied by a poster by Reed and Huang that provides a useful overview of the main apoptotic pathways, and highlights key drug targets and potential drugs that are now being developed. The poster, which is complemented by this month's 'From the Analyst's Couch' on apoptosis-targeting therapies, is a collaboration with Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology and is sponsored by Merck Research Laboratories — Boston. It will be freely available online until the end of April 2005 (http://www.nature.com/reviews/poster/apoptosis).