The article, Dr. Data, includes many multimedia additions, such as audio, a video interview, photos, a powerpoint presentation, and a PDF of the powerpoint.
Excerpts and Main Points from the Article:
Medical Focus
In his lab, Butte asks the big questions, like “What genes are related to all diseases?”, and “Can drugs that are already available be used as therapies for other diseases?”
Butte, a pediatric endocrinologist, treats children with diabetes and growth problems. He also studies the genes involved in diabetes, heart disease, muscular dystrophy, and other conditions, and hopes this will lead to a new understanding of diseases and new ways of treating them.
“The overall goal of my work is to redefine our entire knowledge about all diseases and to predict new uses for all existing drugs,” Butte says.
Research Interests
One of Butte’s areas of concentration is the history of disease classification, or nosology. In studying nosology, Butte’s ultimate goal is to create a genome-based disease classification system that can aid with uncovering new uses for existing medicines.
An example:
Heart attacks and muscular dystrophy are pretty similar at the genomic level. Both diseases alter the activity of the same group of genes. Heart attacks typically affect older people after decades of accumulated damage to blood vessels. Muscular dystrophy, appears in the toddler years as progressive muscle weakness. The disease is incurable, and patients die in their teens or early 20s.
Currently, there are more than 40 medicines used to treat heart attacks but only one for muscular dystrophy, and it’s not a cure.
If existing heart-attack drugs turn out to work against muscular dystrophy, not only would this provide immediate benefits for the thousands of children with the disease, it would also be a huge savings in time and money.
That’s because a pharmaceutical company typically spends close to $1 billion and more than 10 years to develop a new medicine from scratch.
The article also discusses the power of the Gene Expression Omnibus and microarrays.
“Since all the data in GEO is freely available online, anyone with a reasonably good personal computer and an Internet connection can do bioinformatics experiments.”
The supplement “How You Can Be a Bioinformatician” gives an example.