Applying Systems Biology to Benefit Human Health forum: topic
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Giulio Superti-Furga
Thursday, 09 October 2008 18:19 UTC
Frustrated from the skepticism one encounters within institutions, biopharmaceutical companies and funding agencies regarding the usefulness of systems approaches to medicine and in particular in drugs discovery and mindful of the danger of letting hyperbolic general promises create unbelievable expectations and delusions in this area with genomics-like anticlimactic conservatism as consequence, we have initiated a process that should lead to a community-wide research roadmap proposal. The purpose is to define the areas worth focusing on to obtain the facts that are needed as proof of concept for the entire community. In a careful process, we have engaged some of you first in interviews, then with on-line questionnaires and finally with a meeting restricted to 25 people that occurred in May (in Portofino, Italy). The outcome of the meeting is summarized in a Commentary that just appeared in Nature (enclosed). So far it has not been practical to engage all of you directly but we now need your help as we are preparing a WHITE PAPER that covers much more ground of the Portofino discussions and following that measures for implementation.
Here we look for general feed-back. We got this rolling and would like to know if the community is willing to participate in the autodiscipline needed to achieve the goals of the recommendations. Moreover, we are looking for further focus and detail on the proposed ideas and on what could be additional ideas that the group may have overseen.
Moreover
We will post the following topics:
Setting Data Standards
Optimising the application of existing tools
Predictive Toxicology
Therapeutic Area Focus
Communication and Outreach
Updated 09 October 2008 18:23 UTC
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Hi,
building on the topic of network solutions for drug discovery, we have posted a new manuscript about drug-metabolism interactions on Nature Precedings. It is available here and all comments will be welcome:http://precedings.nature.com/documents/2516/version/1
The paper by Adriano and Giulio describes very well the hopes and challenges in transferring systems biology to medical and pharmaceutical applications. ‘Demystifying’ systems biology is certainly a key point. One danger is that the rapid development and ambitious promises of the first years of systems biology have created very high expectations, and now some people may get the feeling that we fail to deliver. We perhaps need to explain better that this is about a long term process, moving towards an integrated and global understanding of living systems. Systems biology is not just another field of biology, to me it looks like a natural progression for biology as a whole… After understanding how small components work in isolation, we need to understand how they work in relation with each other.
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All:
my apollogies for having been out of circulaiton for a while, but I have followed the discussions on this site with interest. Many of the comments usefully reinforce views expressed at the discussions we had at the workshop, and indeed others subsequently, following presentations of our summary at various symposia. The need for some form of coordination of activity and focus is clear and supported by the vast majority of those I have spoken to- the question is how to do this? The idea of perhaps having 3-4 core centres acting as the hub of a broader international consortium has been suggested. We will be developing this point further, as well as picking the point that Cristiano made about the broader impact on human health, in the White Paper which will be submitted to Molecular Systems Biology in January.
Thanks to all for the contributions you have made.
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