Pathogenic, auto-immune or viral, all diseases are actually epigenetic – The Times of India Blog

Though the coronavirus pandemic is the greatest tragedy the world has witnessed in recent times, it also has a potential to be a blessing in disguise as it can transform the way we understand and treat diseases.

If we look at all the diseases broadly, they can be clubbed into three large groups.

Most of the diseases we laypeople recognize are caused by alien pathogens, be it a bacterium or some other parasites. Malaises like cholera, malaria,amebiasis, mucormycosis are simple in nature as they show a clear cause-and-effect relationship between a pathogen and malaise and hence the cure is, in general, eradicating of the alien pathogen.

The other group is of auto-immune diseases. Phenomena like cancer or allergic reaction belong to this confusing group as here the body itself messes things up. These diseases are tricky to cure as they are by-products of some of the critical internal systems. So, to cure them we either remove such cells physically or try and find a way to kill them selectively or just counter their activities by suppressing them, even at a cost.

The last group is the trickiest and that is the virus-caused diseases. Though most of them are not too harmful as a healthy body can deal with them using native immune system, but that is actually the only option as, if the immune system cant deal with them, there is no real cure. We have anti-viral drugs but not at all comparable to the level of success that anti-biotics or anti-parasitic drugs (sad to say that only temporarily) enjoy.

Corona virus diseases belong to the last group and SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is a specific case where the native immune system of some people is not able to cope with it.

In SARS-CoV-2 infection, we have an alien virus pathogen causing auto-immune reaction, making it a bridge between all three groups that we treat differently today and hence it demands that we start re-looking at what we call a disease.

To understand this phenomenon, we have to go to the source of all life, the genetic codes that are enshrined in each living cell. These genetic codes are more like instruction/equations of chemical reactions. They give expression to mindboggling complexity while remaining simple in nature by following simple rules.

Life is a game of these rules and evolution is a game of finding new rules that work. If we put these two together, a disease is a random process of finding new rules that work through genetic interaction between all life forms.

If we try and use a metaphor to understand this better, life is a book, but not a linear one. It has commands with if-then logic.

It is a bit like, if there is a person wearing blue shirt in the room, read the 467thline of the book, but if there is a person wearing red shirt, read the 145thline. This just gets worse as it can even be, if they have a dog, read 179th, so on and on. There is no end to the complexity in the book as it responds to the entire reality and hence, we are now hitting a roadblock in terms of how to use genetics, as it is now understood that there is more outside than inside in terms of the story.

This science of finding relationships about how external factors dictate the way genetic code is read is called epigenetics.

Epigenetics is the quantum physics of biology telling us yet again that the God does play dice.

Thankfully, it is not as bad as it seems. Just as we have probabilistic handles to understand quantum physics, epigenetic is also orderly and has cause-and-effect relationships that we can fathom or will fathom in future (just as we hope for the quantum physics).

This new understanding of life demands a new way of curing, i.e., ensuring that the book is read coherently and if it is made to stray, bring it back on main story-line.

Keeping the book reading on course is obviously life-style corrections that reduce chances of straying, but the challenge is what to do when it goes off-the-course.

The new healthcare of the future would be all about transcending the ideas like parasites or viruses or even auto-immune disorders. They are all part of the epigenetic forces and hence the cure is best found within than without.

Logically speaking, for every disease, the clue is to find the mis-reading of the code it thrives on and finding a way to disrupt it, but there is another twist in the tail/tale or rather an advantage, and that is, each of us are a different version of the book and hence, each of us will respond differently (as we have seen in case of SARS-CoV-2). It is these different responses will help us identify clues if we look for them.

As SARS-CoV-2 is studied a lot, a great start would be to do genetic sequencing of those who have the misfortune of having the genetic predisposition to have cytokine storm when the viral information is inserted in their book. The same process must be conducted for each of the specific cases, be it malaria or cancer.

In short, we need to find the page in the book that derails the metabolic process and find people who have that page first. Once we manage to find that, we will be able to manage the healthcare in a more rational way.

This is clearly a job of couple of millennia (if we are lucky) and SARS-CoV-2 could be a Gods way of asking us to move one step forward.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Pathogenic, auto-immune or viral, all diseases are actually epigenetic - The Times of India Blog