Eager to put their new found scientific knowledge to work, scientists have already begun some of those studies. At Washington University, Stamatoyannopoulos and his colleagues found that gene changes identified by GWAS as involved in 17 different types of cancer seem to affect nearly two dozen transcription factors that translate raw DNA into the RNA that turns into functional proteins. This common molecular thread may lead to new treatments that control the function of these transcription factors in not just one but all 17 cancers, including ovarian, colon and breast diseases. “This indicates that many cancers may have a shared underlying genetic predisposition,” he told reporters. “So we can make connections between diseases and genome control circuitry to understand relationships where previously there was no evidence of any connection between the diseases.”
ENCODE may shed significant light on our most common chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and hypertension, which result from a complex recipe of dysfunction, not just in single genes like, but in a variety of hormones, enzymes and other metabolic factors. Changes in the way some genes are turned on or off may explain the bulk of these conditions, and ultimately make them more treatable. “By and large, we believe rare diseases may be caused by mutations in the protein [or gene-]coding region,” says Green, while the “more common, complicated diseases may be traced to genetic changes in the switches.”
In another example of ENCODE’s power, Birney says the genetic encyclopedia has also identified a new family of regulators that affect Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes the body’s immune cells to turn on intestinal cells. The finding could lead to novel, potentially more effective therapies. “I’ve had more clinical researchers come to my door in the past two years than in the previous 10,” Birney said. “It’s going to be really good fun producing lots of insights into disease over the next couple of years.”
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Not only does ENCODE open doors to new therapies, it also furthers our basic understanding of human development. At the heart of many genetic researchers’ investigations is the desire to understand how each cell in our body, from those that make up our hair to those that reside in our toenails, can contain our entire genome yet still manage to look and function in such widely divergent ways. ENCODE’s scientists knew that certain regulatory mechanisms dictated when and where certain genes were expressed and in what amount in order to give rise to the diversity of cells and tissues that make up the human body, but even they were surprised by just how intricate the choreography turned out to be. “Most people are surprised that there is more DNA encoding regulatory control elements, or switch elements for genes, than for the genes themselves,” Michael Snyder, director of the center for genomics and personalized medicine at Stanford University and a member of the ENCODE team, told Healthland.
In keeping with the open-access model established by the Human Genome Project, ENCODE’s data is available in its entirety to researchers for free on the consortium’s website. The database will undoubtedly fuel a renewed interest in genome-based approaches to both diagnosing and treating disease. Despite initial excitement in the field, in the years since the genome was mapped, gene-guided treatments and gene-therapy approaches to treating disease have proven difficult to bring to the clinic; part of the challenge, geneticists now say, may have been related to the fact that they didn’t fully understand how to control the genes that were affected by disease.
“I am pretty sure this is the science for this century,” Birney said. “We are going to work out how we make humans, starting from the simple instruction manual.” And perhaps we’ll figure out how to make humans healthier as well.