The dream of one day tailoring disease treatment and even cures to individual patients based on their genes is one step closer, thanks to a boost in research funding.
The world-first Centre for Personalised Immunology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, was established in April to better understand immune diseases by looking at their genetic basis consolidating more than a decade's worth of collective research involving hundreds of patients.
But its co-director Professor Matthew Cook said he and the other eight chief investigators expected the approach to be transferable to other types of diseases.
Researchers already know genes play a substantial role in many diseases, but Professor Cook said two big obstacles remain.
"The problem is identifying which genes are responsible and then identifying how that genetic abnormality causes the problem with the cells of the body to actually cause the disease," he said.
Last month the National Health and Medical Research Council pledged $2.5 million over five years for the centre which Professor Cook said will allow researchers to scale up their efforts and advance the "expensive" program.
Researchers hope to make significant gains to the diagnosis, treatment and possible cures to autoimmune diseases like lupus.
"Overall between 3 and 5 per cent of the population develop an autoimmune disease… immune deficiency diseases collectively we think affect about one in 20,000 people," he said.
"Each of these diseases on their own are fairly rare but there are about 80 different autoimmune diseases.
"Immune deficiency diseases are also individually very rare but collectively they account for a lot."
Professor Cook said the burden of immune diseases was "very substantial" as they developed early in life, but the genomics approach to medicine presented a "major transformation" to understand the mechanisms of the diseases.
"People have to be managed throughout their life with these conditions, there are very few of these diseases where we have a cure," he said.
Researchers also hope to better educate the workforce about the genetic approach to medicine helping to take it from the research labs to make it a routine part of clinical practice.
"Any discovery we make is based on the analysis of a particular patient," Professor Cook said.
"The patient presents to their doctor with an illness we don't understand properly… then the aim is to understand the genetic variations present within the patient to work out how the disease is arising… often just from cells we can take from the patients with a simple blood test."
Researchers then look at similar patients to see if they have the same genetic variations.
"We might have 100 patients with lupus but maybe five out of the 100 have their lupus arising from one particular pathway and 20 might have lupus from a different pathway and at the moment we can't distinguish those groups but it's really important to do if we are going to apply precise therapies in the future," he said.
