On Systems Biology in the Here and Now
You might recall some of the pioneers of the field of systems biology (pioneers of defining what the term "systems biology" means, even) see it as a pillar of the next generation of medicine, enabling new technology that will add ten to twenty years to our life expectancy:
It takes five years for people to get anything. The first few times they hear it, they can think of a thousand reasons why it's wrong. Then, after they've heard it a few more times, it starts to sound more logical. If you're a missionary, you've got to be patient with your congregation. We are at the very beginning stages of thinking about this. ... You see what drives the change? Technology. If we invent the technologies that enable this, everything else gets dragged right along. That is one of the fundamental rules of civilization. I think it will make medicine less costly, infinitely more efficient. I think within 20 to 25 years, we'll be living productively 10 to 20 years longer.
The latest issue of The Scientist takes a nuts and bolts, what have you done for me today view of systems biology:
. From early discovery to market, the vast majority of promising pharmaceutical compounds end in failure. Some of these stories end with a whimper or, in the case of something like Vioxx, with a bang.Enter systems biology. The field has as many definitions as it has practitioners, but Current Genomics puts it simply: "The goal of systems biology is to describe and quantitatively model complete biological systems."
Ideally, systems biology incorporates what Lauffenburger calls the four M's: measurement, mining, modeling, and manipulation. Firstly, scientists catalogue de novo response pathways in order to connect cell-surface receptors with gene expression, or piece together a network from published literature. Next, they pick apart the interaction and cross-regulation of the pathways. All this is captured electronically and integrated into a computer model, which is validated in the lab. If successful, this approach could form the foundation for a rational, hypothesis-based method of identifying new drug targets and biomarkers, while minimizing side effects. The hunt for compounds is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Systems biology, supporters say, could be our magnet.
Of course, it is hugely hyped; it seems that most new new things in medicine go through the stage of initial hype, collapse of the hype, and then meaningful progress and broad growth of new applications in the years that follow. Expectations always seem to be both too narrow and ahead of reality for the first decade or so - look at the history of gene therapy, for example.
If only it were so simple. It would be, if systems biology were able to "describe and quantitatively model complete biological systems," as Current Genomics so optimistically put it. But that's currently an impossible dream. To illustrate, the full description of just a single pathway in yeast that triggers the first step toward sexual reproduction is taking up the entire activities of a whole research institute, the Molecular Sciences Institute...
In the case of systems biology, what's irritating is that the unfulfilled hype and the subsequent disdain has obscured the fact that systems biology can be valuable and is finding a place in drug discovery.
There's a far broader future for systems biology than propping up the dry old drug pipeline mode of medical research - the here and now viewpoint is deliberately limited.
We don't presently have access to the computational capacity and complexity management tools to map processes any faster than speeds measured in man-years. That is rapidly changing, however. In a near future when the computation power to simulate an entire body, cell by cell - and molecule by molecule not so long after that - is next to free, and most research takes place in simulation, systems biology is a lynchpin and design manual.
Technorati tags: life extension, medical research