Welcome to the inaugural issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. As you will find, the journal is divided into three sections: Highlights, Reviews and Perspectives. In the Highlights section, we present snapshots from the cutting edge of drug discovery, pinpointing some of the most notable recent research. The section also includes updates on recent intellectual property decisions, and concludes with our regular two-page financial briefing, 'From the Analyst's Couch', which this month looks at the market for antiviral drugs. The Reviews form the heart of the journal, and the diversity of the topics covered in this issue reflects our aim to cover the entire range of disciplines that constitute drug discovery. Erik De Clercq's overview of promising routes to designing novel antivirals combines medicinal chemistry and pharmacology. State-of-the-art chemistry is represented by Olof Ramström and Jean-Marie Lehn's article on target-directed combinatorial synthesis. Dan Roden and Alfred George explore pharmacogenetics in their consideration of adverse drug reactions, a major challenge facing clinical pharmacologists. Tom Blundell and colleagues describe the application of high-throughput crystallography to lead discovery. David Corry's review on allergic asthma concentrates on a specific therapeutic avenue — small molecule targeting of the immune system. Finally, Raymond Dwek and colleagues discuss the therapeutic potential of approaches that target glycosylation, from basic science to clinical development. Our last section, Perspectives, gives greater scope for speculation. Bob Langer and colleagues consider applications of nanotechnology to drug discovery, and Roger Ulrich and Stephen Friend discuss the value of microarrays in toxicological profiling. Whatever your particular area of interest, we hope that our accessible presentation will encourage you to look outside it, and perhaps discover something new.