The messages hidden within the DNA are complex and difficult to interpret. The main problem is the shear quantity of information that needs to be interpreted. The speed by which we can now gather information linking DNA sequences to disease is phenomenal with vast amounts of new information on the causes of disease being produced daily. Bacteria and viruses have much smaller genomes, but we should not forget the value in sequencing their genes as a wealth of knowledge on pathogen diagnosis and target identification for drug discovery is hidden within them.
But the quantity of data available to researchers is fast becoming a problem. Over the next few years, the computing resources needed to store all the genomic data will be mind boggling almost 40 exabytes — far exceeding the requirements of YouTube one to two exabytes per year and Twitter 0.
Finding that nugget of information that is vital to the production of an effective cure in this mountain of information is looking ever less likely. Advanced data handling software will need to be developed if the data is to be put to good use. In academia and in industry, secrecy is perceived to be the norm. Even in the field of genomics, where sharing of information is widespread, data is often not released until the authors secure publication in a top journal, as their future career prospects and employment depend on this.
Institutions and funding organisations will need to ensure more credit is given to researchers openly sharing their data in a timely manner. Otherwise, vital pieces of information may be hidden from those seeking new cures.
You want to save lives. That's what we all get into this medical research area to try to achieve, and yet the challenges are immense. And we make progress, oftentimes, in very small baby steps, even though what we're hoping for are big leaps. It was a difficult blow to the researchers, but going back to the drawing board revealed another approach:. Although failure is frustrating and expensive, drug hunters say the key to progress is to fail well.
A well-designed study that's conducted properly should teach you something, even if the outcome isn't what you wanted. In this case, the lesson was to start earlier. When Lilly's scientists dug a little deeper into their data, they realized that their drug had produced a decent benefit for trial participants who had "mild" Alzheimer's.
Every time they cut the data a different way, they remained convinced they were seeing real progress earlier in the disease. The feature also describes recent work on Ebola and malaria vaccines, and delves into the history of AIDS drug development. For example, cancer cells usually grow much faster than normal cells, and that can be caused by many different kinds of proteins that affect how a cell grows and divides. Scientists have a panel of "likely suspects" now in this case, and we test tumor samples for those protein suspects using a variety of means.
Once the cause of the change in the diseased cell or tissue has been identified, the search for a cure can begin. Sometimes the cause is the lack of a protein or the fact that an altered version of the protein is produced, like in sickle cell anemia with hemoglobin. One way that scientists cure a disease in this case is to give back the good protein to the cells in the form of the DNA or gene for this protein.
This so-called gene therapy is still pretty new, but scientists like myself think the future of this method of curing a disease has some great potential. Other times the cause of the disease is that the new protein acts differently than the normal one.
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