therapeutics. It is from genetics that the core biochemical and molecular basis of the disorder will finally be elucidated, and it is from the latter understanding that rationally designed and effective treatments will be developed. This is a prize well worth striving for. Notably, a recent study showed how the genetics of rheumatoid arthritis is informing target validation and drug discovery. Okada et al. (2014) report that the targets of existing rheumatoid arthritis drugs significantly overlap with the disease-associated genes (3.7-fold enrichment, p<10-5); they also provide genetic data which suggest that certain drugs currently being used in cancer are worth trialling in rheumatoid arthritis. These findings are encouraging, since the genetic architecture of rheumatoid arthritis shows many similarities with schizophrenia (e.g. both currently have ~100 genome-wide significant loci, most with odds ratios <1.2, and without the causal variant at each locus having been identified).
