All diseases are disturbances at the cellular level (Rudolph Virchow, 1858) To treat disease, we must understand its cause. To understand the cause of a disease, we must understand the alterations that occur at the level of individual cells.
With the elucidation of the human genome, we have greatly enhanced our potential for pinpointing the molecular aberrations responsible for even genetically complex diseases. However, identifying mutant genes or altered patterns of gene expression by themselves are insufficient to turn this information in to understanding or new therapies. The functions and cellular contexts of these gene products must also be understood, assays developed to enable their study, and models put in place to test new therapies. Thus, genomics and informatics will increasingly rely on cell biology and cell biologists.
Further, not all diseases are genetically based (infectious disease, for example) nor do all affect processes that can be easily revealed by gene expression patterns.
As the study of cell biology will become increasingly important to the study of disease, the study of the cellular basis of human disease has already produced some fundamental insights into cell biological principles.
Some major human diseases that have been elucidated as a result of systematic cell biological analysis include:
