TED

Stephen Friend spoke at TED 2014 in Vancouver.

In many cases, genetic factors can explain why some people get sick, or why people are predisposed to an illness. But most of the time, knowing about a genetic predisposition for certain diseases hasn't shown us how to prevent or cure that illness.

So maybe looking at sick people is the wrong approach.

Instead, we need to find the people who are genetically predisposed to these diseases but don't get sick, say biochemist Stephen Friend, president of Sage Bionetworks, and Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Friend and Schadt are the principle investigators for the Resilience Project, an initiative that's trying to study those rare people who have the same genetic factors that normally cause disease but who are somehow protected by either genetic mutations or environmental factors.

In a TED 2014 talkreleased online today, Friend calls these people "unexpected heroes" most people don't know they have these hidden protective traits that could perhaps help others.

It turns out, he explains, that there are precedents for finding people like this and creating therapies based on the factors that make them unique.

In 1980s and 1990s, doctors realized that a very small number of people with high levels of HIV never developed AIDS, he explains. They had certain genetic mutations that prevented them from getting sick. Now, treatments for AIDS are being developed based on those mutations.

Along the same lines, most individuals who have high lipid levels, meaning fatty acids and cholesterol, develop heart disease. But there are some who don't. This can sometimes be explained by genetic mutations or protective environmental factors. Once these are better understood, they may provide new strategies for fighting heart disease.

See the original post:
How Healthy People Who Should Be Sick Could Revolutionize Medicine

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