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Antibody Transfection into Neurons as a Tool to Study Disease Pathogenesis
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Biography is the dark matter of disease pathogenesis
Ralph I Horwitz1, Allison Hayes Conroy1, Mark R Cullen2
1Temple University, Philadelphia, USA.
None:
Heterogeneity in disease pathogenesis persists despite advances in genomics and imaging because medicine measures biology while ignoring biography, the person's lived experiences that shape biological systems. Trauma, chronic stress, social isolation, and structural inequities create measurable shifts in immune, neural, and endocrine regulation, yet remain unmeasured in most research. Just as physics required dark matter to explain the behavior of galaxies that visible matter could not, medicine must integrate this biographical "dark matter" to explain disease pathogenesis. Mechanistic, patient-level analysis demands studying how biography becomes biology to explain disease risk and pathogenesis.
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