Reflecting our goal of bringing together topics from across the whole spectrum of drug discovery and development, this month's issue features articles on subjects ranging from chemoinformatics to complementary medicine. In the first Review, Saltzman and Olbricht describe how new technologies for the delivery of molecular agents are furthering efforts towards engineered tissue regeneration, which holds particular potential for conditions that involve damage to the central nervous system. Therapy in the central nervous system is also a theme of Neubig and Siderovski's Review of regulators of G-protein signalling, which considers the properties that could make them attractive targets for intervention. Focusing on the other side of the cell membrane, Christopoulos discusses the potential advantages of allosteric modulation of cell-surface receptors, and approaches to detecting and quantifying allosteric interactions. Wüthrich and colleagues highlight the growing application of NMR techniques to drug discovery and design, which is complemented by this month's From the Analyst's Couch article, about the changing role of structural proteomics in drug discovery. And in the last Review, Miller considers the steps that are involved in the construction and searching of chemical databases. Engel and Straus open the Perspectives section with a Business Outlook article that summarizes the strategies that are being developed to provide reliable data on the safety and efficacy of complementary and alternative medicines. Next, members of IUPHAR's Executive Committee discuss the many essential roles that pharmacology has in drug discovery and development. Finally, Montuschi's Innovation article focuses on the monitoring of indirect indicators of disease states in exhaled-breath condensate as a new non-invasive method for detecting lung inflammation.