How we are working towards prevention and diagnostics of Alzheimer's, and drug treatments for AD, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases

Genes contribute to disease - Some genes more than others

We recognize that many genes are often involved in contributing to one disease. These genes work together in processes, and processes work together in unusual ways to cause disease

We perform in silico and in vitro functional modelling to interpret the activities of genes as sets of co-expressed functional pathways. This systematic functional framework allows for prediction of the key pathways that are correlated in their activity between a disease, a drug, and response to its application. Our approaches provide us with the ability to determine the dynamics of pathway activity and how they relate to each other.

A fundamental window into the function of the cell, pathway dynamics  allow us to see alterations in pathway activity with disease progression - allowing us to map and predict which pathways will be affected and which pathways are driving sets of processes. Given these insights, this system is an obvious tool for helping us decide on which pathways and genes are important to consider for therapeutic intervention.

We take network models of gene-gene interaction, overlaid and organised according to interacting functional modules. Combined with appropriate ontology development, the interplay between metadata from experiments, functional characterisation, data integration and genome variant mapping and associated gene priorization provides a sound basis for integration. By making this resource available to the community, we work with a cadre of community researchers interested in building models from data.