Dr. Joseph Loscalzo to deliver SCAI 2015 Mullins Lecture on how network medicine could uncover personalized treatments for heart disease
Increasingly, physicians and scientists are discovering the complex connections among genes in the body that influence disease. These discoveries will enable personalized treatments in an emerging area of science known as network medicine. In his upcoming Mullins Lecture at the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) 2015 Scientific Sessions, "Network Medicine: A Systems Approach to Cardiovascular Disease Diagnosis and Management," Joseph Loscalzo, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Physician-in-Chief of Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will discuss how advances in big data are enabling the new field of network medicine to uncover the complex pathways that influence disease.
"Diseases are rarely as simple as we want them to be," said Dr. Loscalzo. "In the early days of pharmacology, we used to think diseases were the result of a single cause and they could be treated with a single drug. Scientists would test hundreds of compounds until the one right treatment was found. Now we know that disease is the result of a complex system gone awry."
In his SCAI 2015 Mullins Lecture, Dr. Loscalzo will discuss how network medicine is attempting to discover the roadmap to that complex system by mapping connections between genes. By using "big data" - the large data sets now available from ongoing genomic studies - researchers are able to develop "wiring diagrams" of how one gene is networked to other genes.
"The genes that are suspected of causing disease don't operate in a vacuum. They sit in a complex network of relationships among thousands of gene products (proteins) that interact," said Dr. Loscalzo. "Abnormalities in genes that are linked can contribute to disease."
Dr. Loscalzo compares network medicine to providing the assembly diagram (molecular network relationships) needed to construct a machine from its component parts (genes or gene products).
"Imagine you've never seen a car before, and you are given a box full of car parts and are asked to build a car, without ever seeing the assembly diagram or knowing what the car looks like. In genomic medicine right now, we have a lot of car parts (i.e., the genes that are associated with diseases from simple epidemiological association studies), but we don't know what the final product is supposed to look like. What we're missing is the assembly diagram, and network medicine is attempting to develop the diagram," he said.
Once the diagram is developed, scientists can begin to tease out which pathways between genes influence disease. The interactions uncovered by network medicine could provide breakthroughs in treating and preventing congenital heart disease (CHD), which is known to have strong genetic ties, said Dr. Loscalzo. At SCAI 2015, he will share examples of recent research that is helping unlock some of the complexities of CHD and providing the promise of new, personalized treatments, which is the ultimate goal of network medicine.
"If you're looking for a magic bullet to cure a single disease, you need to think again," he said. "Only by understanding these multiple levels of complexity will we begin to make a dent in how we deal with these chronic, complex diseases. In this modern era of genomics and big data, we have a great opportunity to understand for the first time complex diseases in all of their dimensions. That's the promise, but I think it's a real promise that can be realized within a decade."
Dr. Loscalzo will deliver the Mullins Lecture on Thursday, May 7, at the SCAI 2015 Scientific Sessions in San Diego. Visit www.SCAI.org/SCAI2015 for more information about SCAI 2015.