The Curious Wavefunction has a nice post on the issue of selective and non-selective kinase inhibitors. An interesting commentary, especially in the light of the recent paper on network polypharmcology. While there have been a number of papers on polypharmcology and the idea itself is very attractive, it has seemed to me that for this approach to succeed we need very detailed information on the targets and systems involved in these networks. Indeed, a current project of mine is currently hitting this problem. As Ashutosh notes,
… in the first place we don’t even know what specific subset of kinases to hit for treating a particular disease. First comes target validation, then modulation.
So much to do, so little time 