Systems Biology Makes The News

The following article appears in the January issue of "Gen: Genetic Engineering and BioTechnology News."

"Systems Biology Alters Drug Development".

This article paints Systems Biology as a new and emerging paradigm. It certainly is new in medical research and medicine. At the same time, the article carefully avoids criticizing the existing reductionist paradigm. It also avoids the question of the safety of drugs developed through reductionism. The burning questions in my mind are:

• When will these emerging technologies reach a critical mass so that society and our legal system force democratic scrutiny over current medical research budgets?


• What will be the effect on the medical establishment and its control over research and the practice of medicine once the technologies scale?


• What will the InfoTech lobby do to get in on the bonanza? Will it become a "Right to innovate" issue if tax dollars are used as a competitive barrier?


• What will happen to politicians closely aligned to the existing pharmaceutical and medical industry? Will they switch from blaming insurance companies to blaming doctors?

Excerpts from the Article

In this first quote, we see the holy grail of medical research at a company called Genstruct, In Silica Modeling. But why have all prior attempts at using computers in research failed?

"The company combines data from various sources, for example, high-throughput genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data to create cause-and-effect disease models. It applies artificial intelligence tools to look at all the predicted and observed relationships between the data and puts it into the context of a complex system."

Now that medicine is borrowing Systems know-how from InfoTech, companies like Genstruct can finally automate and eliminate much of the work done by chemists. At the same time, the diagnostics and drug products developed with this approach will eliminate the work currently performed by doctors.

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This next quote speaks to how Entelos uses a Systems approach to help eliminate animal testing. Given the audience, it is understandable that neither the writer nor Dr. Friedrich point out that their work provides evidence that the "Bottoms up approach" is not mathematically sound. At what point do these technological advances create legal jeopardy for existing research models? It may well be the lawyers that drive this paradigm shift in the end.

"What makes Entelos’ approach unique, according to Dr. Friedrich, is the company’s top-down method, which synthesizes quantitative data from thousands of peer-reviewed papers into a single framework. “Our model doesn’t contain every piece of biology ever known in a subject, but what it does do is get you to something usable much faster than a more standard bottom-up approach,” explained Dr. Friedrich. The company uses a mathematical method to quantitatively describe the relationship between various biological entities over time, making simulations and predictions possible."

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