http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/global-push-get-disease-genes-medicines

The Human Genome Project’s completion in 2003 brought hope that geneticists would soon uncover the genes behind scourges such as heart disease and Alzheimer’s. But soon came a reality check: Most common diseases have been tied not to a few genes, but scores or even hundreds, each raising a person’s risk of disease by a tiny amount. Despite a growing list of these genetic markers, identified by combing the DNA of large groups of people with and without a disease, researchers have only figured out what a specific marker means for a person’s health in a few cases.

In a bid to increase that number, human geneticist Eric Lander of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues gathered last week near Washington, D.C., to launch a nonprofit, the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA). Nearly 170 researchers from 19 countries, from Japan to South Africa, met for 2 days to talk about how to get from maps (genetic markers) to mechanisms (what a gene does inside cells) to medicines (using the information to develop treatments).