Therapeutic Translation of Genomic Science: Opportunities and limitations of GWAS

Manuel Hermosilla and Jorge A. Lemus

No 23989, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many scientists predicted a swift revolution in human therapeutics after the completion of the Human Genome Project (“HGP”). This revolution, however, has been slow to materialize in spite of the scientific advances. We investigate the role of biological complexity in slowing down this revolution. Our test relies on a disease-specific measure of biological complexity, constructed by drawing on insights from Network Medicine (Barabási et al., 2011). According to our measure, more complex diseases are associated with a larger number of genetic mutations—higher centrality in the Human Disease Network (Goh et al., 2007). With this measure in hand, we estimate the rate of translation of new science into early-stage drug innovation by focusing on a leading type of genetic epidemiological knowledge (Genome-Wide Association Studies), and employing standard methods for the measurement of R&D productivity. For less complex diseases, we find a strong and positive association between cumulative knowledge and the amount of innovation. This association weakens as complexity increases, becoming statistically insignificant at the extreme. Our results suggest that biological complexity is, in part, responsible for the slower-than-expected unfolding of the therapeutical revolution set in motion by the HGP.

JEL-codes: I1 L65 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: EH PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Therapeutic Translation of Genomic Science: Opportunities and Limitations of GWAS , Manuel Hermosilla, Jorge Lemus. in Economic Dimensions of Personalized and Precision Medicine , Berndt, Goldman, and Rowe. 2019

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23989.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Therapeutic Translation of Genomic Science: Opportunities and Limitations of GWAS (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23989

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23989

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().