Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Systems Biology is Moving Towards Clinical Applications
While it now remains a research tool, systems biology is moving toward clinical applications, including personalized
Imagine going to a doctor's office. your complete genome sequence, which provides a probabilistic prediction of your future health, is part of your medical file. To see how that genetic component is playing out and to obtain a snapshot of your current health status, your doctor orders a standard test of more than 2,000 proteins and metabolites. According to the results of those tests, your doctor recommends ways for you to maintain or improve your health through either medication or behavior modification.
This network illustrates a cause-and-effect model of the mechanisms involved in the transition of prostate cancer from androgen dependence to androgen independence. The colors indicate whether a component increases or decreases (green is observed increase, red is observed decrease, yellow is predicted increase, and blue is predicted decrease). The labels H1 to H5 represent five major hypotheses of mechanisms responsible for the progression of prostate cancer. Sounds futuristic? Perhaps, but it's not as far off as it seems, and systems biology will help make it a reality. Such a personalized approach to medicine is only one of the clinical applications of systems biology on the horizon.
"We've struggled for eons to figure out how to handle biological complexity," says H. Steven Wiley, director of the biomolecular systems initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Biological research has traditionally taken a one-at-a-time approach to studying genes and proteins, the so-called reductionist approach. Now, tools such as DNA and protein microarrays and mass spectrometry have made it possible to study many components and clarify how they work together to regulate and carry out biological processes. The goal of systems biology is to combine molecular information of various types in models that describe and predict function at the cellular, tissue, organ, and even whole-organism levels.
More from here
Imagine going to a doctor's office. your complete genome sequence, which provides a probabilistic prediction of your future health, is part of your medical file. To see how that genetic component is playing out and to obtain a snapshot of your current health status, your doctor orders a standard test of more than 2,000 proteins and metabolites. According to the results of those tests, your doctor recommends ways for you to maintain or improve your health through either medication or behavior modification.
This network illustrates a cause-and-effect model of the mechanisms involved in the transition of prostate cancer from androgen dependence to androgen independence. The colors indicate whether a component increases or decreases (green is observed increase, red is observed decrease, yellow is predicted increase, and blue is predicted decrease). The labels H1 to H5 represent five major hypotheses of mechanisms responsible for the progression of prostate cancer. Sounds futuristic? Perhaps, but it's not as far off as it seems, and systems biology will help make it a reality. Such a personalized approach to medicine is only one of the clinical applications of systems biology on the horizon.
"We've struggled for eons to figure out how to handle biological complexity," says H. Steven Wiley, director of the biomolecular systems initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Biological research has traditionally taken a one-at-a-time approach to studying genes and proteins, the so-called reductionist approach. Now, tools such as DNA and protein microarrays and mass spectrometry have made it possible to study many components and clarify how they work together to regulate and carry out biological processes. The goal of systems biology is to combine molecular information of various types in models that describe and predict function at the cellular, tissue, organ, and even whole-organism levels.
More from here
Labels: Bio-engineering
PermaLink - Systems Biology is Moving Towards Clinical Applications posted by Ecacofonix : 7:24 AM
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