Short excerpt from a January 2010 FMU YouTube audio clip featuring Jeffrey Bland, PhD and another speaker. They discuss a paradigm shift from single-cause models of disease toward network/pleiotropic models, with the other speaker highlighting hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance as pleiotropic drivers that implicate system-level therapeutic approaches for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
We're trying very hard to get people to think about networks rather than pathology as an endpoint of a single process. And that's a very different way of thinking about disease. And most of us were trained to think about it. It's kind of a mind shifting paradigm. And it seems like your work really speaks into that very nicely because it cuts across so many different aspects that we can't just put our finger on one causative agent and say, that is this disease.
Well, I think that's very true. I mean, even though my work has focused most closely on hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance. And so that in and of itself is the system that affects so many different other systems that it is by its very nature a pleiotropic model, even though we're focusing on a single peptide as a key player in that ultimate web of causation. So, yeah, absolutely. And that very much drives a different approach to therapeutics. I think, very much away from the silver bullet, the days of the cholinesterase inhibitor or the single molecular target, as likely to be the therapy that will prevent or cure Alzheimer's disease, I think, and moving more towards therapies that do have these pleiotropic effects on the systems that we now know are greatly increasing the risk of developing Alzheimer's.
