Plenge Lab
Date posted: June 19, 2017 | Author: | No Comments »

Categories: Drug Discovery Human Genetics

A new manuscript by Jonathan Pritchard and colleagues published in Cell (see here) has garnered a lot of attention from the genetics community (see here, here, here, here, here). In this blog, I add to the ongoing commentary. I first summarize the main conclusions of the manuscript, and then I discuss the implications for drug discovery and development. For the latter, the three main points are: (1) “core genes” represent good drug targets, especially if they harbor a series of alleles that link function to phenotype; (2) regulatory networks identified by “peripheral genes” point to specific cell types and mechanism that can be used for phenotypic screens; and (3) new approaches are needed to drug cellular networks – what I will refer to as “circuit pharmacology” – as the bulk of drug discovery today is an attempt to reduce complex mechanisms to individual drug targets.

Here is a brief summary of the main conclusions of the manuscript.

  1. There is a small number of “core genes” that “provide mechanistic insights into disease biology and may suggest druggable targets.” How these core genes are defined, however, remains to be determined. The manuscript suggests a few approaches, including: genes with large effect size variants from GWAS and genes with an allelic series, especially those with lower-frequency variants of larger effects.

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