Be careful what you wish for. That is the unexpected lesson of the past decade of biomedical research, which has been characterized by an overwhelming abundance of interesting things to study and powerful ways to study them. A pioneer of this era, MIT geneticist Eric Lander, speaks eloquently of the “global view of biology,” meaning that scientists now have extraordinary tools to study not only individual genes, but also multiple genes at the same time. Rather than immediately investing all their resources in a few favorite genes (the traditional approach), modern researchers first can survey thousands of initial candidates, then identify and ultimately direct their attention to the most important players and pivotal networks.But we are increasingly discovering that this global perspective comes at an unexpectedly steep price: We’re making a lot more mistakes. Or, at least, we seem to be having a lot of trouble picking out the rare, meaningful signal from the deafening noise in the background.
Rx For Medical Research
Most biomedical research is framed by an outdated view of disease, a linear mind-set that focuses on simple causes rather than complex relationships within dynamic systems. If we are to achieve President Obama’s audacious goal of “a cure for cancer in our time,” we must radically alter the way we think about biology and disease.
Physicians and medical researchers are traditionally taught to consider disease in terms of simple causes and isolated linear pathways. This one-gene-one-disease approach also informs the way most animal models of disease are developed. Technology readily enables researchers to engineer mice with specific molecular defects in one or a small number of genes as an experimental proxy for human disease. While some of these models are informative and reasonably predictive, most are not.
The limitations of animal models are highlighted by results emerging from powerful genomic studies of human diseases ranging from Type 2 diabetes to pancreatic cancer. For these and many other conditions, the cause is not a single defect, or even a handful of defects, but rather, combinations of hundreds of possible defects, each contributing slightly to the overall risk of disease.
