Rare Diseases and Common Diseases can Converge to the Same Clinical Conditions

In June, 2014, my book, entitled Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs: Keys to Understanding and Treating the Common Diseases was published by Elsevier. The book builds the argument that our best chance of curing the common diseases will come from studying and curing the rare diseases. Here is a short excerpt from Chapter 10. As applied to diseases, convergence occurs when different genes, cellular events, exposures, and pathogenetic mechanisms all lead to a similar clinical phenotype. Convergence is found in common diseases and in rare diseases. In the case of systemic responses to injury, convergence may have an evolutionary origin. For example, humans have evolved to respond in an orchestrated way to a variety of pathologic stimuli. Various antigens can stimulate an orchestrated acute allergic response that may be identical for a wide variety of antigens (hives, bronchial constriction, puffy eyes). Likewise, humans have evolved to a systemic response to local infection that is specific for our species [7]. Convergence is observed in all the rare diseases that have genetic heterogeneity, either allelic heterogeneity or locus heterogeneity (see Section 9.3). In these cases, many underlying genetic causes yield the same clinical phenotype. 10.1.2 Rule—Regardless of the path taken, many pathologic processes will converge to the same pathologic condition. Brief Rationale—There are a limited number of ways that the body can respond to malfunctions.Think about all the things tha...
Source: Specified Life - Category: Pathologists Tags: common diseases complex diseases disease convergence drug development genetic disease orphan diseases orphan drugs rare disease rare disease models of common diseases rare disease research Source Type: blogs