In the modern drug discovery pipeline, identification of novel drug targets is a critical step. Despite rapid progress in developing biomedical techniques, it is still a great challenge to find promising new targets from the ample space of human genes. This fact is partially responsible for the situation of “more investments, fewer drugs” in the pharmaceutical industry. A series of recent researches revealed that successfully targeted genes share some common evolutionary and genetic features, which means that the knowledge accumulated in modern evolutionary biology and genetics is very helpful to identify potential drug targets and to find new drugs as well. In this article, we comprehensively summarize the links between human drug targets and genetic diseases and their evolutionary origins, with an attempt to introduce these novel concepts and their medical implications to the biomedical community.

中文翻译：

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药物靶标的进化和遗传特征

在现代药物发现管道中，确定新的药物靶标是关键的一步。尽管在开发生物医学技术方面取得了快速进展，但是从人类基因的广阔空间中找到有希望的新靶标仍然是一个巨大的挑战。这一事实是造成制药业“更多投资，更少药品”的部分原因。最近的一系列研究表明，成功靶向的基因具有一些共同的进化和遗传特征，这意味着现代进化生物学和遗传学中积累的知识对于识别潜在的药物靶标以及寻找新药非常有帮助。在本文中，我们全面总结了人类毒品目标与遗传疾病及其进化起源之间的联系，