crystalball answers every question that you want to ask about a target sequence. It's used by heads of drug discovery, CIOs, and CFOs at all of the major pharmaceutical companies.

Here's a sample crystalball session:

% crystalball mySeq -rdtime -rdcost -profit -outfile stdout
Answers every drug discovery question you have about this sequence.
Drug discovery development time: 10-15 years
Drug discovery development cost: $800 million[1]
Profit: Not nearly as much as you'd like!

^[1] Time and cost estimate from "Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development Pegs Cost of a New Prescription Medicine at $802 Million." Tufts University press release (November 30, 2001).

Mandatory qualifiers

[-sequence] (sequence)

Sequence USA.

[-outfile] (outfile)

Output filename.

Optional qualifiers

-competition (boolean)

Who else is working with this target?

-rdtime (boolean)

Total research and development time to bring a drug for this target to market.

-rdcost (boolean)

Total cost of our research and development effort.

-animalstudies (boolean)

What will we learn from the animal studies?

-clinicaltrials (boolean)

Detail all of the surprises we'll get from the clinical trials.

-fdaproblems (boolean)

List all of the issues the FDA will raise with our paperwork.

-fdatime (boolean)

How long will the FDA take to render a decision?

-profit (boolean)

How much will we make after the drug gets to market?

Advanced qualifiers

-everythingelse (boolean)

Tell us everything else we'd really like to know now rather than later.

In case you haven't guessed, crystalball is a completely fictitious routine. EMBOSS doesn't contain this functionality. No one else has it either, but lots of people wish for just such a tool!