Target: New ways to battle disease
For decades, developing medicine to treat disease was a lengthy and often discouraging process: create a drug, test on a lab animal, hold a human clinical trial, and hope to calibrate an effective dose to kill the disease without devastating the patient. Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the MIT are tapping the human genome mapped by its founders, hoping to create effective treatments for vexing afflictions. “When you rely on biology — not models but real humans — to reveal the root cause of the disease, the good news is you can discover insights for even the most daunting ones, like schizophrenia,” said Stuart L. Schreiber, Ph.D. ’81, director of the year-old Center for the Science of Therapeutics. Schreiber made his remarks Wednesday during a presentation on “The Road to Vital Therapy,” part of the Broad’s midsummer science lecture series. More than 500 people registered for the event, which...