Can Human Disease Networks Help Us Cure Multiple Diseases With One Gene?
This article focuses on the “human disease network” (HDN) and the “disease gene network”(DGN). Both of these networks were designed by scientists from the United States and South Korea, with the HDN showing all of the human diseases that have known genetic associations, and the genetic connections between these diseases, and the DGN showing how various genes are connected by diseases. Both of these networks were designed with the intention of being able to simplify and make treatment more efficient, that is to say, if two diseases are linked by the same gene association, a treatment for one of those diseases may prove to be a treatment to help to alleviate symptoms for the other. It is hoped that the invention of these networks will completely change the way that physicians categorize illnesses, focusing less on the specific tissue that is involved in the illness, but rather the molecular pathways involved in the illness, and shift the focus toward active genes or alleles.
However, there is some disagreement amongst scientists about whether or not this shift will be beneficial. Some scientists believe that this shift will not be sufficient enough to dispel all of the ambiguities that come from genome mapping. For example, some people may be diagnosed with genetic variants but never actually display any symptoms associated with this variant or ever develop disease. More importantly, scientists fear that this shift will take attention away from the fact that most polygenic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, are caused by much more than just genetic variations. Although they genes do play a role, environment can make a massive difference in human disease, and environment cannot be accounted for through maps such as these.
The maps shown in this article directly link to what we are learning in lecture because they are networks no different from the ones we’ve focused on like Facebook friends or disease epidemics. In these networks, the nodes represent a disease, with the size of the node reflecting the number of genes that are associate with that disorder. The thickness of the edges in the network represent the number of genes shared by the connected diseases.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genome-wide-association-studies-and-human-disease-788