The challenges associated with the

Posted by Ellie on May 24, 2008 in Systems Biology | 0 comments

Ingenuity Systems, based in Mountain View, Calif., has spent five years assembling its knowledge base of how various genes and proteins in cells and diseases are related to one another. You cant afford to generate enough data to do statistical data mining kind of approach, which is hypothesisfree experimentation, Schneider says. If you dont have good biological or clinical experimental design, the back end is completely useless. Its different from physiology or holism, which study the entire system. We know that many complex diseases are not caused by single gene going wrong.

The key is the unitoperation approach. They make good use of simulation technologies before they actually build costly prototypes, the equivalent of going to clinical trial, he says. You cant afford to generate enough data to do statistical data mining kind of approach, which is hypothesisfree experimentation, Schneider says. Lauffenburger, professor of biological engineering and member of the Computational & Systems Biology Initiative at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For example, Westerhoff and his colleagues are building computer models that they call silicon cells. These models include the interaction and kinetic properties of the cell systems.

Theres whole plethora of tools available and none of them talk to each other, he says. There is an aspect of discovery science in it, because youre trying to elucidate some hypotheses. Because of its many facets, systems biology attracts scientists from variety of disciplines, including the basic sciences, engineering, and computer science. We found that the glucose transporter is the best predicted drug target, rather than glyceraldehyde3phosphate dehydrogenase, which is the drug target that is worked on most, Westerhoff says.

see the biggest impact that systems biology is where this convergence will happen, although theres not yet consensus on what systems biology actually is. You cant afford to generate enough data to do statistical data mining kind of approach, which is hypothesisfree experimentation, Schneider says. In addition, we use these simulations to identify highvalue drug targets and combinations of these targets that we can determine are nontoxic and efficacious, Hill says. Because of its many facets, systems biology attracts scientists from variety of disciplines, including the basic sciences, engineering, and computer science.
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