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Understanding how biological processes are regulated on a whole-genome scale will help in developing targeted pharmaceutical approaches. For instance, identifying the control mechanism underlying how a cell knows when to divide is key to finding out what goes wrong in diseases such as cancer, where cells divide uncontrollably.

"The pharmaceutical industry is based on therapeutics developed for correcting faulty protein products, which result from breakdowns in metabolic pathways. A new area of pharmaceutical industry will develop based on drugs targeting breakdowns in genome regulatory networks. Perhaps we can correct some problems even before a faulty protein is produced," predicts Young.

The group is already working on doing the same analysis for the human genome, whose regulatory network consists of about 1,700 transcription factors. Although high quality sequence data currently exist for about a third of the human genome, about 95 percent of it should be available next spring.

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Contact: Nadia Halim
halim@wi.mit.edu
617-258-9183
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
24-Oct-2002