Chemical Engineering Seminar Series

Systems Biology Platform: Roadmap from Characterizing the Mechanism of Disease to Identifying Health Restoring Therapies

Abstract:

Systems biology is an inter-disciplinary field that applies computational and mathematical methods to the studies of complex interactions within biological systems as opposed to the traditional reductionist approach used in research.

In the past decades, there has been tremendous technological progress leading to the generation of large multi-omics datasets representing preclinical and clinical transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, imaging, and other data types. Analysis of these datasets requires convergence of computational and biological research. Advanced computational methods can be applied for the integration and analysis of the data from multiple sources and multiple formats, and for the generation of the therapeutic hypothesis that will be tested experimentally and in silico with subsequent parameter optimization for successful drug candidates and combinations. Systems biology methods including computer modeling and quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) can be leveraged to select the dose and to inform clinical trial design for successful testing of the therapeutic hypothesis in the clinic and increasing the chances of drug approval.

Thus, in this new era of technological and data sciences progress, systems biology has great potential to improve and accelerate the drug discovery and development process by applying mathematical methods for efficient analysis of biological datasets.