The degenerative and metabolic diseases associated with ageing populations are driving up the cost of healthcare in the West, raising tough political questions about how to pay for it and how the root causes can be addressed.
New Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) technology in combination with complex systems science promises to be part of the answer. Currently used to create optimum strains of bakers yeast for the manufacture of proteins or peptides that are used in various industries, QTL technology can help to unravel the reality of biological function, and how it deteriorates into degenerative and metabolic disease, paving the way to more effective treatments.
Lifestyles drive disease, but how?
The manner in which Western lifestyles compromise healthy function and ultimately lead to disease are highly complex and tend to manifest in biologically chaotic ways. The impact this has on the systems that drive healthy bodily function is therefore likely to be varied. This suggests that the imbalances and variances in the systems that cause disease are unlikely to be driven by a single mechanism, but rather take different forms. Emerging research into cancer and other degenerative diseases supports this view.
The problem is complexity
Human genes don’t change over the duration of our lives, but they can mutate and be damaged, which can have a potentially deleterious effect on the complicated systems that drive bodily function. The proteins expressed by our genes interact both within and between the cells inside these systems. Gene expression is dynamic and varied, potentially altering the balance and functionality of the body’s systems in different ways.
Most human diseases are not predetermined by our genetic makeup, but they can make individuals vulnerable to particular malfunctions. Over time, interactions with our surroundings have an impact on alterations in bodily systems. These interactions can be positive in terms of nutrient supply and provocation of endogenous repair systems, or negative in terms of damage from pollution, for example. The damage tends to be chaotic in nature, with free radicals impacting on whatever they encounter within the body.
Lifestyles make the problem harder
Evolution has minimised the risk of a single point of damage having an immediate catastrophic effect on our key bodily functions. It has done this by equipping the systems that make our bodies run with alternative compensatory pathways. This adds to biological complexity. As degenerative or metabolic diseases progress, they get harder to treat or reverse because the malfunction generates downstream knock-on consequences making it more diverse and entrenched. Lifestyle impacts these systems constantly, so any solution will, by necessity, involve reducing damage from this source. Knowledge of where to intervene and why among all this complexity is consequently a prerequisite to be able to adjust the system’s functional outputs for the better.
Interpreting complexity
Our bodies function at the multi-cellular level. Understanding the way in which these complex systems interact with the environment is a prerequisite for creating solutions to any disease of degeneration or metabolism which involves deterioration of organs and tissues. The same is true for addressing the symptoms of ageing.
Fortunately, the use of breeding, screening and genomic analysis in combination with complex systems science provides a toolkit that can address the daunting challenge of unlocking biological complexity. This synergistic approach empowered by QTL technology may yet find potential solutions to some of the West’s greatest healthcare challenges.
