Editorial: Establishing genetic pleiotropy to identify common pharmacological agents for common diseases

Pleiotropy, the phenomenon where one gene affects multiple traits, appears to be pervasive in biology. For example, findings from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) demonstrate that GWAS loci for different traits overlap nearly 50% of the time (Chesmore et al., 2018). Often these traits are related, as is illustrated by GWAS of endometrial cancer risk, where all 16 known loci contain variation that has been associated with other traits, including susceptibility to other cancer types as well as known risk factors for endometrial cancer (e.g., body mass index and age of menarche) (O’Mara et al., 2019).