A Massive Quest Begins to Find Good Genes That Protect Us from Deadly Ones
What if the best clues to curing genetic illness are not in the disease genes themselves, but in the resilient genes of those who somehow don’t become ill? That’s the idea behind The Resilience Project, a research project recently launched by Stephen Friend, President of Sage Bionetworks. As a “test-run” for the project, he teamed up with Eric Schadt, PhD, Director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences, and the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Co-Investigator of the Resilience Project, who previously worked for Friend at Merck. They were able to get anonymized samples from more than half a million people from databases, and from them they found 10 people who seem to carry genes tha t cause 12 diseases, including rare but deadly diseases cystic fibrosis, Gaucher’s disease, and MPS II.
-Dr. Eric Schadt, Director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences and the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai