Everyone counts in GWAS

The debate about the value of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) took a new twist with a Cell publication showing complex traits such as height and schizophrenia are controlled by broad, interconnected swaths of the genome instead of select tissue-specific genes. Rather than dispensing with GWAS, the findings argue for a shift in thinking about targets away from single molecules, in favor of entire networks.

The message to drug developers is that the gold in GWAS is not in the ability to find needles in haystacks, but in the ability to find webs of targets that can be exploited to greater effect. The idea is that for complex phenotypes, targeting sets of interconnected molecules with single or multiple compounds can be far more powerful at stamping out disease than the standard target-by-target approach...