‘Healthy people provide better clue to diseases’

When trying to understand a disease, researchers typically study sick patients. Perhaps that is the wrong approach. Instead, we need to find 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.

Friend calls these people “unexpected heroes” — most people don’t know they have these hidden protective traits that could perhaps help others. He explains that there are precedents for finding people like this and creating therapies based on the factors that make them unique.

For instance, most people with high lipid levels, meaning fatty acids and cholesterol, develop heart disease. But there are some who don’t. This can be explained by genetic mutations or protective environmental factors. Once these are better understood, they may provide strategies for fighting heart disease.Through the project, they’ll be able to identify the genetic mutations and environmental factors.