Stecker Mark M, Peltier Morgan R, Reiss Allison B
Fresno Institute for Neuroscience, Fresno, CA 93730, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, Hackensack Meridian Health, Neptune City, NJ 07753, USA.
AIMS Public Health. 2022 Aug 23;9(3):618-629. doi: 10.3934/publichealth.2022043. eCollection 2022.
Despite intensive research, effective treatments for many common and devastating diseases are lacking. For example, huge efforts and billions of dollars have been invested in Alzheimer's disease (AD), which affects over 50 million people worldwide. However, there is still no effective drug that can slow or cure AD. This relates, in part, to the absence of an animal model or cellular system that incorporates all the relevant features of the disease. Therefore, large scale studies on human populations and tissues will be key to better understanding dementia and developing methods to prevent or treat it. This is especially difficult because the dementia phenotype can result from many different processes and is likely to be affected by multiple personal and environmental variables. We hypothesize that analyzing massive volumes of demographic data that are currently available and combining this with genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic profiles of AD patients and their families, new insights into pathophysiology and treatment of AD may arise. While this requires much coordination and cooperation among large institutions, the potential for advancement would be life-changing for millions of people. In many ways this represents the next step in the information revolution started by the Human Genome Project.
尽管进行了深入研究，但对于许多常见且严重的疾病仍缺乏有效的治疗方法。例如，全球有超过5000万人受阿尔茨海默病（AD）影响，人们在这方面投入了巨大努力和数十亿美元。然而，目前仍没有能够延缓或治愈AD的有效药物。部分原因在于缺乏一种包含该疾病所有相关特征的动物模型或细胞系统。因此，对人类群体和组织进行大规模研究将是更好地理解痴呆症并开发预防或治疗方法的关键。这尤其困难，因为痴呆症的表型可能由许多不同过程导致，并且可能受到多种个人和环境变量的影响。我们假设，分析目前可用的大量人口统计学数据，并将其与AD患者及其家属的基因组、蛋白质组和代谢组学图谱相结合，可能会产生对AD病理生理学和治疗的新见解。虽然这需要大型机构之间进行大量协调与合作，但取得进展的潜力将对数以百万计的人产生改变生活的影响。从很多方面来看，这代表了人类基因组计划引发的信息革命的下一步。
