Eureka 2019: Targeting Therapy in Diabetes

For the fifth year in a row, Endocrine News spoke with editors from Endocrine Society journals to get the scoop on the top endocrine discoveries of 2019. Here is part 5 of Eureka! 2019.

Endocrine Reviews Associate Editor Anna Gloyn, DPhil, professor of molecular genetics & metabolism and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, finds “Genetic Risk Scores for Diabetes Diagnosis and Precision Medicine,” by Mahajan A., et al., especially compelling.

“One of the most exciting developments in the area of genetics of diabetes has been the implementation of ‘soft-clustering’ approaches to gain mechanistic inference at type 2 diabetes genome-wide association studies (GWAS) loci.”

Published in July, this study provides ample support for the idea that polygenic scoring used in precision medicine could translate to effective targeted therapy in diabetes.

“One of the most exciting developments in the area of genetics of diabetes has been the implementation of ‘soft-clustering’ approaches to gain mechanistic inference at type 2 diabetes genome-wide association studies (GWAS) loci,” Gloyn says. “In 2018, two groups independently developed approaches to cluster T2D-risk variants based on their impact on relevant physiological traits. This year in Endocrine Reviews, the authors of these papers put together an informative article covering the potential of this approach to inform on diabetes diagnosis and aid precision medicine.”