[I am an employee of Celgene. The views expressed here are my own.]
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy clicks her heels and hopes for re-entry from her dream world by repeating, “There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…” I often feel that many in the genetics community look at their human genetics data with the same youthful optimism as Dorothy – clicking their genetic heels and wishing “my genetic discovery will become a drug…my genetic discovery will become a drug…” But without rigor and discipline, such heel-clicking won’t overcome many of the challenges that face drug hunters along the tortuous journey from a genetic idea to a new medicine.
In this blog, I discuss a recent study on the genetics of multiple sclerosis (MS) published in Science (see here). This is a beautiful study that substantially advances the genetic landscape of patients with a devastating disease. However, the study falls short in terms of the application of human genetics to drug discovery. To chart a course for the future, I introduce the concept of mechanism, magnitude and markers (oh my!), which I refer to as the three M’s. …