Many diseases lack a clear cause, making the search for therapies especially challenging. For example, there is no known cause for more than 80% of the cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and the remaining cases can be caused by mutations in any one of more than twenty genes. It is unlikely that any single therapeutic strategy will work for all these patients. We seek to understand such complex diseases better by gathering a wide variety of omic, clinical and behavior data. I’ll describe the approaches we are using to integrate these data, identify disease subtypes and explore their therapeutic potential.

Dr. Ernest Fraenkel is a professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology