Richard Young

Chronic diseases have a huge impact on humanity. They are the biggest contributors to what we call morbidity and mortality. As we age, the likelihood of developing a chronic disease goes to nearly 100%. We have not been able to identify the mechanistic underpinning of most of these diseases, because there are many different factors. There isn’t just one gene that causes type 2 diabetes; different combinations of genetic and environmental factors can cause it to develop in different people.

This complexity creates a challenge for developing therapeutics. What you want is to find one causative feature that’s present across many patients, because then you can create a drug to treat that feature and it will be broadly useful. Now, we think that we’ve identified a common underlying mechanism that contributes to many chronic diseases. If that’s true, it will be a game changer for drug development.

The mechanism is something we are calling “proteolethargy.” We found that many proteins move more slowly in cells in a disease state, and we figured out the pathway by which these proteins are slowed down. Now, we can begin to test whether drugs that rescue protein mobility are effective in treating chronic disease.