You’ve been diagnosed with “incurable” leukemia. Is it a death sentence? Maybe not, our research at the Broad Institute suggests, because a heart attack treatment or some other unexpected drug might someday save your life. We reached this conclusion by looking at how drugs interact with the genes in diseased cells—a pattern-identification method that offers hints about innovation practices in general.
Physicians have always classified diseases by their symptoms. But by deciphering the genetic code within diseased cells, researchers are finding that genes for dissimilar diseases—say, leukemia and heart disease—may share the same basic roots. We have developed a “connectivity map,” which characterizes drugs according to the genes they activate rather than the diseases they treat. To identify the common genetic roots in diseased cells, we look at which genes are turned on or off by which drugs in each cell type and then match the gene-activation signature against a database of thousands of others. Finally, we run a program that seeks matches between the signatures of diseased cell types and those of various drugs. If a match is found, we hypothesize that the drug might qualify as a possible treatment for that disease—even if there was no prior reason to suspect a connection. One such drug is now in clinical trials for the treatment of relapsed leukemia.
Just as we are seeking new cures by searching for unexpected commonalities among cells, firms may discover better approaches to business problems by uncovering new relationships among wildly different products or solutions. Our map’s potential should remind even skeptics of the value of seeking fresh, unbiased ways of looking at old data, projects and even strategies.
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