An international research team has compiled the first catalogue of tissue-specific pathologies underlying hundreds of inherited diseases.
These results provide information that may help treat conditions such as breast cancer, Parkinson's disease, heart disease and autism. The report from scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and has been published online.
"Disease processes in humans are far from being exhaustively understood and characterized, in part because they are the result of complex interactions between many molecules that may take place only in specific tissues or organs. Experiments to directly study these interactions in human patients would not be possible, which limits our understanding of how diseases arise and which molecules and genes are involved," says co-lead author Kasper Lage, PhD, of the MGH Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories.