Science Daily: Cancer and Computational Biology

Science Daily has a write up on a new paper that emphasize the importance of mathematical modeling of cancer cells. The paper, On the Role of Cell Signaling Models in Cancer Research, seeks to "emphasize the role and importance of the careful mathematical/computational modeling of signaling networks for the understanding of aberrant signaling in cancer and for the development of targeted therapies".

From ScienceDaily

Biology exists in a physical world. That's a fact cancer researchers are beginning to recognize as they look to include concepts of physics and mathematics in their efforts to understand how cancer develops -- and how to stop it.

Personal Genomes

The price of SNP analysis based on DNA microarrays has fallen to the point to make a $400 test commercially viable. The New York Time ran an article about a reporter getting his personal genome analyzed. One of the themes that some have picked up on, is that currently this type of analysis is still a very nascent technology. Correlations between specific SNP markers and particular diseases have been suggested in literature, but we are still a long way from true understanding. The recent call to arms for improvements in Systems Biology research illustrates how much is left to be done.
The Personal Genome Project, which seeks to fully sequence the exomic content of 100,000 personal genomes and provide the data openly with correlated medical histories. Preliminarily information on the first ten subjects has been released. And while the actual sequencing data is not downloadable off the web site, they do encourage you to contact them if you are interested in reserch collaberations.


Nova recently aired a show about the project:

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Systems Biology is important, starting.... Now

Systems Biology is apparently important, at least that is what 110 scientists from Europe are saying. Science Daily, Genome Web Daily News, are reporting that scientist from the European Science Foundation have published a report entitled, "Advancing Systems Biology for Medical Applications" (SSA LSSG-CT-2006-037673). This paper stresses the importance of developing systems biology techniques for improving medicine.


For the layman, Systems Biology refers the system of biochemical interactions, both the core components and the complex network of reactions that occur between them. Its genius occurred around the time that the human genome project was completing and the total estimate of protein coding genes was rapidly plummeting from initial expectations. Given the complexity of the human body, predictions reached up to 150K. But after all was said and done, estimates pegged the number at around 20K. Only twenty thousand genes to make a human, and it takes 41 000 genes to make rice.

If the complexity didn't come from the total number of genes, then it came from the complex network of those genes interacting.

For the cynic, basically nothing has changed. Everyone already knew that systems biology was important and the next step in understanding complex organisms. All this is about is reminding politicians that if they want results, they better be willing to sign some rather large checks.
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