Using bioinformatics tools and databases has become a routine job for most biologists and the role of bioinformatics professionals in the pharmaceutical industry has changed accordingly in the last decade. This talk outlines the daily tasks and challenges of a bioinformatician at Bayer Schering Pharma. One focus is of course the 'bioinformatics service': getting the right bioinformatics resources integrated in a meaningful way in order to make lab scientists more efficient in taking well-informed decisions within their drug discovery projects on a daily basis. Ideally they can do this without input of bioinformaticians. This requires on one hand to have all relevant public and in-house information (about drugs, disease, gene, patents, project-data, etc) available with a few mouse clicks. On the other hand bioinformatics needs to establish and organise adequate solutions for the collection, storage, adequate analysis and presentation of the in-house generated data especially data around genes like e.g. gene expression or RNAi screening results. The main task, however, is to apply bioinformatics to identify novel targets within the different indications. This requires a deep understanding of the underlying biology of the diseases. Here, we use the available plethora of in-house and public data to filter out the most promising target candidates based an the different criteria. In collaboration with our wet lab scientists we then have to show that intervention at this point in particular improves the in-vitro or in-vivo disease parameters.