Welcome to Biomed Bites, a weekly feature that introduces readers to some of Stanford's most innovative researchers.
Tweak a piano string and you've created a different note. Tweak a gene and no one knows exactly what might happen. Perhaps the resultant protein is completely defective. Perhaps the same change does nothing in me but turns your world upside down. Who knows?
One Stanford researcher is working to demystify some of that variability, an endeavor that could lead to big changes in the development of therapies for diseases such as cancer. Daniel Jarosz, PhD, assistant professor of chemical and systems biology and of developmental biology, describes his work in the video above:
We all know there are many mutations associated with disease, for example, that give rise to that disease in some patients, yet there are other patients that have the same mutations and don’t have any effects. We'd really like to understand that...
The clinical benefits of this work are potentially very large.
For example, Jarosz said he and his team study why some tumor genes are able to evolve rapidly to evade chemotherapy. With a greater understanding of what conditions cause rapid evolution — and drug resistance — they can more easily evaluate new therapies.
Learn more about Stanford Medicine’s Biomedical Innovation Initiative and about other faculty leaders who are driving biomedical innovation here.
Previously: From finches to cancer: A Stanford researcher explores the role of evolution in disease, Computing our evolution and Whole genome sequencing: The known knowns and the unknown unknowns
