CONVENTIONAL wisdom on finding cures for diseases needs to be turned on its head, claims an Australian team. “For therapeutics you don’t want to know which genes are causing the disease. You want to know which ones give you a cure,” says Doug Hilton of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne.
The standard way to study a disease is to find a strain of mouse that develops it, or a way of triggering the disease in mice. Then the mechanism is studied. Understand the disease, the thinking goes, and you can design drugs to treat it.
Hilton and…
