NOBLE ON...

GENETIC TESTING AND INSURANCE

Genetic information and insurance companies are uneasy bedfellows, and Prof Noble is concerned about how things are shaping up.

Fears have been expressed that insurance firms would grade people based on their genetic information and use this data to load premiums for people with certain genetic compositions.

"I would worry very much about a situation where insurance companies can cherry-pick. There will be an underclass which will be those who are unfortunate enough to have a particular genetic composition," he says.

He also stresses that the current levels of general genetic screening for the well population - who can now order relatively cheap screens of their DNA online - can usually tell only in broad outline what someone's future health will be.

"It's highly dependent on probabilities, not certainties, and there's huge interaction with environmental factors," says Noble, who argues that such genetic information is best used as a motivation to lead a healthy lifestyle.

INTEGRATED APPROACHES

Taking an integrated or "systems" approach to understanding biology is opening up new avenues for understanding and treating disease, according to Noble.

By understanding how molecules interact as part of a whole system, rather than looking at them in relative isolation, pharmaceutical companies could find drug targets that may otherwise have been ignored, says Noble.

As an example he describes how his group discovered a protein in the heart that regulates the speed of beating. When they blocked this protein, the heart didn't stop.

This is because of the "wiggle room" in the overall biological system which allowed it to compensate for the missing protein, according to Noble.

French pharmaceutical company Servier saw the potential of blocking this protein within the whole system of the heart and used it to develop an anti-angina medication, explains Noble.

The challenge now is to convince other pharmaceutical companies to take the systems view when searching for potential drugs, which Noble believes could vastly improve the hit rate for finding useful compounds.

"We are saying don't target a single site, target the system. And understand the system, because otherwise you won't know whether targeting a site will do any good," he says.

It's a big shift in mindset, not to mention funding structures, but Noble believes a systems approach to pharmaceutical research would soon put health-promoting compounds in the pipeline that would otherwise not have been considered.

"My dream would be to convince pharmaceutical companies to at least do the obvious pilots to test whether a systems approach will help, and if it begins to help then you can have more confidence to shift resources in that direction," he says.