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Systems biology brings hope of speeding up drug development
November 20, 2008Almost every day brings news of an apparent breakthrough against cancer, infectious diseases, or metabolic conditions like diabetes, but these rarely translate into effective therapies or drugs, and even if they do clinical development usually takes well over a decade. One reason is that medical research is conducted in highly fragmented groups focusing on specific pathways or components leading to drugs that turn out not to work properly or to have dangerous side effects after cycles of animal and then clinical testing in humans. This process is expensive and wasteful, resulting from the fact that at present researchers lack tools to assess in advance how candidate drugs work across the human's whole biological system. The discipline of systems biology represents an attempt to unite the medical research community behind a common approach to understanding and modelling the complex interactions of the human, leading to more effective and faster drug development.
Europe is now at the forefront of this growing movement that brings together a number of disciplines including mathematics, physics, statistics, bioinformatics, genetics and all the "omics" technologies dealing with genes, proteins, and biological pathways. Earlier this year leading specialists in systems biology met at an important conference organised jointly by the European Science Foundation and the University of Barcelona, providing a snapshot of current progress and a roadmap for future research.
The conference provided a platform to direct and accelerate other ongoing programmes in which the emerging tools of systems biology are being applied to specific areas of medicine, notably the SBMS (Systems Biology to combat Metabolic Syndrome) initiative. Metabolic syndrome is the term for various conditions that can lead to diseases such as type 2 diabetes where cells of the body develop resistance against insulin, impairing the regulation of blood glucose levels. The aim of SBMS is to understand the molecular and cellular systems that underlie risk factors associated with various diseases resulting from metabolic syndrome, by studying them at a systems wide level rather than focusing on individual specific components even when these appear to play a central role.
Yet the challenge of system biology as a whole is to integrate different components of the body at widely different scales of time and size, without being swamped by immense quantities of data, or computational models that are impossibly complex to handle, according to Roel van Driel, systems biology specialist at the University of Amsterdam, who was co-convenor of the ESF conference as well as head of the SBMS initiative. A big problem in medical research lies in duplication of effort and in particular creation of large sets of data that are difficult to share between projects, according to van Driel, who said that biology as a whole needed to become a big science, based on a stronger more analytical framework, more like physics. "The problem is not shortage of funding in medical research, but fragmentation into too many small projects," said van Driel. "We need a large-scale programme."
In fact biology has already had one large-scale programme involving focused collaboration between many projects across the world, the Human Genome Project of the 1990s. This led to a basic map of the genetic code common to all humans, although not of all the variations, or alleles, that give rise to individual differences. In fact the genome project yielded only limited information about the underlying genes and what they do, let alone how they are regulated and interact in different organs and metabolic pathways. That is the much greater challenge of systems biology, requiring the whole organism to be broken down into manageable systems that can be linked together to make predictions such as the effect of a particular candidate drug. These systems were discussed at the ESF conference, which also highlighted progress in the important related field of synthetic biology, involving engineering of organisms such as bacteria to create novel "systems" capable of manufacturing effective drugs.
European Science Foundation
Yet the challenge of system biology as a whole is to integrate different components of the body at widely different scales of time and size, without being swamped by immense quantities of data, or computational models that are impossibly complex to handle, according to Roel van Driel, systems biology specialist at the University of Amsterdam, who was co-convenor of the ESF conference as well as head of the SBMS initiative. A big problem in medical research lies in duplication of effort and in particular creation of large sets of data that are difficult to share between projects, according to van Driel, who said that biology as a whole needed to become a big science, based on a stronger more analytical framework, more like physics. "The problem is not shortage of funding in medical research, but fragmentation into too many small projects," said van Driel. "We need a large-scale programme."
In fact biology has already had one large-scale programme involving focused collaboration between many projects across the world, the Human Genome Project of the 1990s. This led to a basic map of the genetic code common to all humans, although not of all the variations, or alleles, that give rise to individual differences. In fact the genome project yielded only limited information about the underlying genes and what they do, let alone how they are regulated and interact in different organs and metabolic pathways. That is the much greater challenge of systems biology, requiring the whole organism to be broken down into manageable systems that can be linked together to make predictions such as the effect of a particular candidate drug. These systems were discussed at the ESF conference, which also highlighted progress in the important related field of synthetic biology, involving engineering of organisms such as bacteria to create novel "systems" capable of manufacturing effective drugs.
European Science Foundation
Systems Biology Current Events and Systems Biology News RSSEarly-stage, HER2-positive breast cancer patients at increased risk of recurrence
Early-stage breast cancer patients with HER2 positive tumors one centimeter or smaller are at significant risk of recurrence of their disease, compared to those with early-stage disease who do not express the aggressive protein, according to a study led by researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Researchers develop innovative imaging system to study sudden cardiac arrest
A research team at Vanderbilt University has developed an innovative optical system to simultaneously image electrical activity and metabolic properties in the same region of a heart, to study the complex mechanisms that lead to sudden cardiac arrest.
Building a complete metabolic model
Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) and other institutions have constructed a complete model, including three dimensional protein structures, of the central metabolic network of the bacterium Thermotoga maritima (T. maritima).
2 software tools that improve identification of cancer biomarkers earn certification
The explosive growth of genomic and proteomic data has ushered in a new era of molecular medicine in which cancer detection, diagnosis and treatment are tailored to each individual's molecular profile.
Launch of the first standard graphical notation for biology
Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues in 30 labs worldwide have released a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information - the biology equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.
Caltech scientists help launch the first standard graphical notation for biology
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and their colleagues in 30 laboratories worldwide have released a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information-the biology equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.
Algebra adds value to mathematical biology education
As mathematics continues to become an increasingly important component in undergraduate biology programs, a more comprehensive understanding of the use of algebraic models is needed by the next generation of biologists to facilitate new advances in the life sciences, according to researchers at Sweet Briar College and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech.
Risk of frailty in older women dependent on multisystem abnormalities
A study published online ahead of press in the Gerontology Society of America's Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences reports that the condition of frailty in older adults is associated with a critical mass of abnormal physiological systems, over and above the status of each individual system, and that the relationship is nonlinear.
Caltech physicists create first nanoscale mass spectrometer
Using devices millionths of a meter in size, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a technique to determine the mass of a single molecule, in real time.
Reviews of microbial gene language published in special issue of Trends in Microbiology
Ten articles describing how a universal language to describe genes is bringing benefits to the study of the microbial world have been published in a special issue of Trends in Microbiology, co-edited by Virginia Bioinformatics Institute professor Brett Tyler.
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