What's interesting about this (I think) is that they're trying to open up research data that usually gets discarded or hidden. They're not necessarily talking about clinical trials of drugs in the FDA approval process. There's lots to be learned from the effects of drugs on various cell or tissue types at various stages of disease or age or any other variable of interest.
If a research group is studying the effects of compound A on some disease (atherosclerosis, for example), they might use a microarray study the effects of the changes in gene expression on endothelium. Maybe that compound turns out to be useless in this context, but they have data that might be meaningful on some other pathway like cell adhesion which is often implicated in cancer. That data would have been tossed because it was uninteresting to original question but could be meaningful to someone looking at something else.
But now you have two bits of information. Compound A doesn't effect atherosclerosis but it effects cell adhesion. And that tells us something about the wiring of the cell type in question. In their view, the interaction of genes forms a network and hitting one part of the network has an effect on cell adhesion but not atherosclerosis. So those pathways must not be directly linked. But compound A hits something in the cell adhesion subnetwork.
With a lot of little stories like this, you could build yourself a detailed idea of how different aspects of cellular machinery interact. And what targets are good to hit and what aren't.