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Right now it is very difficult for us to be able to identify who
is going to develop lung disease, who is going to develop very severe lung disease, and who
is going to respond to particular types of treatment. If we understand the molecular
cues of different types of lung disease, we think that we’ll be able to predict who
is at risk for developing lung disease and how that disease is going to change over periods
of time within an individual.
To be able to identify better treatments, but also more personalized treatments
based on genetic background of the individual would be real important.
If the founding fathers of medicine, William Ossler, actually had
a gene chip and had these molecular techniques we would right now call diseases very differently.
They’d be classified very differently because we would know that based on knowledge that
we didn’t have before that this new knowledge , these new patterns of molecules will reflect
unique prognoses of the disease, warrant unique treatments and so this is absolutely a direction
that has to be taken if we are going to bring treatment of the disease to the next level.
It is unique both in the level of collaboration between the organizations
involved, the ambitions to both generate outstanding science and sharing it immediately with the
public and the scientific community.
It allows us to get past some of the major barriers in this type of
research which tend to be the collection of large groups of subjects.
To combine all of these its an amazing molecular technique in such
a well characterized population already using the resources that went in to characterizing
these people and now bringing it to a new level by adding additional characterization,
organization and thoughts by the group, we have a very good chance of making discoveries
that otherwise would have been very difficult to make.