Quantifying the Potential for Future Gene Therapy to Lower Lifetime Risk of Polygenic Late-Onset Diseases.

ABSTRACT: Gene therapy techniques and genetic knowledge may sufficiently advance, within the next few decades, to support prophylactic gene therapy for the prevention of polygenic late-onset diseases. The risk of these diseases may, hypothetically, be lowered by correcting the effects of a subset of common low effect gene variants. In this paper, simulations show that if such gene therapy were to become technically possible; and if the incidences of the treated diseases follow the proportional hazards model with a multiplicative genetic architecture composed of a sufficient number of common small effect gene variants, then: (a) late-onset diseases with the highest familial heritability will have the largest number of variants available for editing; (b) diseases that currently have the highest lifeti

SUBMITTER: Oliynyk RT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6651814 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature