SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The contact information should read: Sage Bionetworks +1-206-667-2102; Thea Norman, +1-206-667-3192.The corrected release reads:
THE RESILIENCE PROJECT, A NEW APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF GENES IN HEALTH AND DISEASE, PROFILED IN SCIENCE AND TED TALK
The Resilience Project, a collaboration between researchers at Sage Bionetworks and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is pursuing an innovative and large-scale approach to identifying the role that genes and genetic mutations play in human health and disease. Rather than studying the genes of people who are sick, the Resilience Project has a goal to scan DNA samples from about one million healthy adults with the goal of identifying the small number of people who remain healthy despite carrying mutations that are known to cause rare disease in childhood. This approach provides an opportunity to identify protective genes and environmental factors that may enable the development of new therapeutics or ways to prevent disease. The May 30th issue of Scienceincludes a perspective on the Resilience Project authored by Dr. Stephen Friend of Sage Bionetworks and Dr. Eric Schadt of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Project’s lead principal investigators (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/970.full). A related TED talk delivered by Dr. Friend is also being made available online today (http://www.ted.com/talks/2004).
“The Resilience Project inverts the traditional approach to gene-based disease research by focusing on those who are healthy rather than those who are sick,” said Dr. Friend. “While rare, our initial research looking retrospectively at approximately 500,000 DNA samples does in fact identify handfuls of individuals who harbor disease-causing mutations yet remain unaffected. We believe that these rare individuals can provide a trove of information about other factors – genetic, environmental, and others – that can be used to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.”
Not only is the Resilience Project pursuing a novel path to genetic research, it is doing so through an innovative model – crowdsourcing the million DNA samples it seeks to collect from volunteers around the world. Consequently, this project has the potential not only to inform our understanding of human health and disease, but also to establish a new approach to conducting large-scale genetic studies in a highly cost-effective manner.
Additional information about the Resilience Project is available at http://resilienceproject.me/.
