Person:

Wu, Di

A major challenge in human genetics is to devise a systematic strategy to integrate disease-associated variants with diverse genomic and biological datasets to provide insight into disease pathogenesis and guide drug discovery for complex traits such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA)1. Here, we performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis in a total of >100,000 subjects of European and Asian ancestries (29,880 RA cases and 73,758 controls), by evaluating ~10 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We discovered 42 novel RA risk loci at a genome-wide level of significance, bringing the total to 1012–4. We devised an in-silico pipeline using established bioinformatics methods based on functional annotation5, cis-acting expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTL)6, and pathway analyses7–9 – as well as novel methods based on genetic overlap with human primary immunodeficiency (PID), hematological cancer somatic mutations and knock-out mouse phenotypes – to identify 98 biological candidate genes at these 101 risk loci. We demonstrate that these genes are the targets of approved therapies for RA, and further suggest that drugs approved for other indications may be repurposed for the treatment of RA. Together, this comprehensive genetic study sheds light on fundamental genes, pathways and cell types that contribute to RA pathogenesis, and provides empirical evidence that the genetics of RA can provide important information for drug discovery.

Starting with genetic or environmental perturbations, disease progression can involve a linear sequence of changes within individual cells. More often, however, a labyrinth of branching consequences emanates from the initial events. How can one repair an entity so fine and so complex that its organization and functions are only partially known? How, given the many redundancies of metabolic pathways, can interventions be effective before the last redundant element has been irreversibly damaged? Since progression ultimately proceeds beyond a point of no return, therapeutic goals must target earlier events. A key goal is therefore to identify early changes of functional importance. Moreover, when several distinct genetic or environmental causes converge on a terminal phenotype, therapeutic strategies that focus on the shared features seem unlikely to be useful – precisely because the shared events lie relatively downstream along the axis of progression. We therefore describe experimental strategies that could lead to identification of early events, both for cancer and for other diseases.

Competitive gene set tests are commonly used in molecular pathway analysis to test for enrichment of a particular gene annotation category amongst the differential expression results from a microarray experiment. Existing gene set tests that rely on gene permutation are shown here to be extremely sensitive to inter-gene correlation. Several data sets are analyzed to show that inter-gene correlation is non-ignorable even for experiments on homogeneous cell populations using genetically identical model organisms. A new gene set test procedure (CAMERA) is proposed based on the idea of estimating the inter-gene correlation from the data, and using it to adjust the gene set test statistic. An efficient procedure is developed for estimating the inter-gene correlation and characterizing its precision. CAMERA is shown to control the type I error rate correctly regardless of inter-gene correlations, yet retains excellent power for detecting genuine differential expression. Analysis of breast cancer data shows that CAMERA recovers known relationships between tumor subtypes in very convincing terms. CAMERA can be used to analyze specified sets or as a pathway analysis tool using a database of molecular signatures.