Implications of publicly available genomic data resources in searching for therapeutic targets of obesity and type 2 diabetes

• Published in: Experimental & molecular medicine 2018, 50(0), , pp.1-13
• Main Author: Jung, Sungwon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 38/39; 38/61; 45/43; 631/208/199; 631/208/205/2138; 64/60; 692/308/1426; 692/699/2743/137/773; 692/699/2743/393; Animals; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Databases, Nucleic Acid; Diabetes; Diabetes mellitus; Diabetes mellitus (non-insulin dependent); Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 - drug therapy; Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 - genetics; Gene expression; Genome, Human; Genome-wide association studies; Genome-Wide Association Study; Genomes; Humans; Hypoglycemic Agents - therapeutic use; Medical Biochemistry; Metabolic disorders; Molecular Medicine; Obesity; Obesity - drug therapy; Obesity - genetics; Phenotyping; Review; Review Article; Stem Cells; 생화학
• ISSN: 1226-3613; 2092-6413
• DOI: 10.1038/s12276-018-0066-5

Obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are two major conditions that are related to metabolic disorders and affect a large population. Although there have been significant efforts to identify their therapeutic targets, few benefits have come from comprehensive molecular profiling. This limited availability of comprehensive molecular profiling of obesity and T2D may be due to multiple challenges, as these conditions involve multiple organs and collecting tissue samples from subjects is more difficult in obesity and T2D than in other diseases, where surgical treatments are popular choices. While there is no repository of comprehensive molecular profiling data for obesity and T2D, multiple existing data resources can be utilized to cover various aspects of these conditions. This review presents studies with available genomic data resources for obesity and T2D and discusses genome-wide association studies (GWAS), a knockout (KO)-based phenotyping study, and gene expression profiles. These studies, based on their assessed coverage and characteristics, can provide insights into how such data can be utilized to identify therapeutic targets for obesity and T2D. Metabolic disease: Publicly available genomic data sets can aid drug development Genomic data sets and mouse models can reveal new therapeutic targets for combatting obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D). Sungwon Jung from Gachon University School of Medicine in Incheon, South Korea, reviews the various types of publicly available resources for probing the genetic causes of obesity and T2D. These include: genome-wide association scans, which use a case-control study design to find common genetic variants linked to disease susceptibility; knock-out mouse models, in which individual genes are mutated to study cause and effect; and gene expression profiles, which reveal the activity levels of large numbers of genes in different tissues. While each data type has its unique strengths and weaknesses, they complement each other and researchers should take advantage of these resources to develop new therapeutic strategies for these hard-to-treat metabolic conditions.