Adrestia Therapeutics — Gene networks to the rescue

Identifying synthetic rescue mutations in healthy people may provide new avenues for fighting disease

Decades of research on genetic mutations have had one overriding goal: to understand how specific mutations interfere with physiological processes and promote disease. Adrestia Therapeutics, a spin-out of the University of Cambridge in the UK, is taking a new tack. Rather than looking at how mutations cause illness, they are scouring the genome for mutations that keep people healthy despite a genetic predisposition to disease. The idea is that mutations that put an individual at high risk of developing a disease can be overridden by mutations elsewhere in the genome. This phenomenon, called ‘synthetic rescue’, holds out the tantalizing possibility of providing an entirely new strategy for discovering therapeutic targets and drugs. (…)

Read the complete article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41587-022-00011-3