Why can one person smoke with no apparent ill-effects while another gets lung cancer? Why does one identical twin get Alzheimer's when his brother does not? Two U.S. research projects announced on Wednesday will develop new ways to analyze data try to find answers to those and other such health questions in the links among genes, environment and disease. One program at the National Institutes of Health will examine some potential environmental causes of common ailments, with an emphasis on how environment can affect genes that make some people susceptible to disease. A second initiative will link the NIH and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Pfizer Inc. of New York and California's Affymetrix Inc., to look for tiny DNA code changes that underlie many diseases. "Virtually all diseases have a hereditary component, transmitted from parent to child through the three billion DNA letters that make up the human genome," said Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH according to Reuters. "Both initiatives promise to rapidly identify the myriad genes in an individual that, taken together, contribute to an increased risk of illness -- or that increase the chances of a healthy life." The projects will sequence genes and also mine data provided by ongoing studies such as the Human Genome Project. Researchers will work to design new tools to measure environmental factors, such as wearable sensors that could measure substances in the air or how much a person exercises. --More 22 09 Local Time 19 09 GMT
