by Karen Brune Mathis
Managing Editor
Nemours Principal Research Scientist Jim Sylvester offered an abbreviated course in biology Monday to the Meninak Club of Jacksonville.
“We do research and education in addition to clinical care,” he said of Nemours, a pediatric health care system with a clinic in Jacksonville.
The Nemours system includes a hospital in Delaware and pediatrics group practices that serve areas of Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as well as Jacksonville, Orlando and Pensacola.
A Nemours Children’s Hospital and Health Campus is under construction in Orlando.
Nemours has more than 40 different research programs. “Our scientists and clinicians work together to solve the mysteries of a patient’s illness - its cause, the best therapy and the hope of a potential cure,” according to Nemours.
Sylvester is one of those scientists and said that “predictive and personalized medicine” was under development.
To explain, Sylvester summarized the “Human Genome Project,” a $3 billion effort that he called a ”monumental and historic event in human history” not unlike the accomplishment of landing men on the moon.
The www.genomics.energy.gov website reports that, the Human Genome Project was the international 13-year effort, formally begun in October 1990 and completed in 2003, to discover all the estimated 20,000-25,000 human genes and make them accessible for further biological study.
The website said a genome is all the DNA in an organism, including its genes. Genes carry information for making all the proteins required by all organisms. These proteins determine, among other things, how the organism looks, how well its body metabolizes food or fights infection and sometimes even how it behaves
According to the website, the project was coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.
The project goals, it said, were to identify all the genes in human DNA; determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA; store the information in databases; improve tools for data analysis; transfer related technologies to the private sector; and address the ethical, legal, and social issues that may arise from the project.
Though the project was completed, the data analyses will continue for many years.
“We have diseases caused by multiple genes,” said Sylvester. The challenge is to understand how each person is individually affected.
“We don’t want to have therapy. We want to have prevention,” he said.
By forecasting the risk for developing a disease, a person could be put on a prevention plan. Further, each person’s DNA could be interpreted for the risk and prevention plan.
For example, he said, people don’t have diabetes for the same reason.
Also, he said cancer cells are normal cells gone awry. “My lung cancer is different from your lung cancer,” he said.
Treating those differences is the goal. “It’s individual drugs targeting individual proteins gone awry,” he said.
By identifying the abnormal cells early, a person at risk could be treated and not develop cancer, he said.
356-2466