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 Why Predictive
Integrative biology
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- The pharmaceutical industry has
been fundamentally transformed over the past five
years. All international groups have undergone considerable
changes.
- One reason for this is the enormous
increase in accumulated information pertaining to
the fields of biotechnology and genetic engineering.
- Another reason is the increasing
demand for innovative and effective treatments against
complex, chronic diseases pharmaceutical companies
are faced with today.
- However, most biomedical research
is done on a detail level using scattered approaches.
Each scientist is an expert at his or her piece
of the puzzle, but scientists have had to assemble
those pieces in their heads. The human genome project
has made available incredible quantities of genetic
information, yielding thousands of potential new
drug targets, but scientists have to make educated
guesses about how those genes are involved in disease,
how molecular-level interventions (drugs) will affect
the patient as a whole, and where they should focus
their research for the best success. Traditionally,
these uncertainties have been resolved through years
of trial-and-error research that can be slow, expensive,
and prone to error. These approaches, which have
been of real value in the past, are proving increasingly
ineffective against complex diseases.
- As knowledge accumulates, biological
mechanisms become more and more intricate to understand.
Living organisms cannot be reduced to their genomes
or their molecular components. Their complexity
is elsewhere.
- In all eukaryotic and prokaryotic
systems, proteins arising from gene transcription
and translation give birth to interactions leading
to intracellular events that are either structural
(construction of fibres, walls, membranes, tubes,
etc.), or biochemical (transformation of glucose
into organic acids, alcohol, polysaccharides, etc.)
in nature, consuming energy but also producing energy
in latent forms (ATP/GTP, fatty acids, starch/glycogen,
etc.).These events then lead to changes in the nature
of local intra- and extra-cellular environments.
These environmental changes in turn influence the
interaction potential between proteins and therefore
not only current events but also, and above all,
the nature and types of events that may occur in
the immediate future. Thus, the simple occurrence
of a biochemical event induces a series of differential
effects leading to waves of contextual modifications
which in turn affect both the format and the functions
of interaction complexes.
- Furthermore, all the cells and
tissues of living organisms function through interconnected
dynamic and synergistic networks. Every cell carries-out
its tasks while communicating with its neighbours
through a wide variety of means. The multiplicity
and richness of these short-range and long-range
interactions leads to the complexity associated
with living systems that current Cartesian approaches
cannot begin to decipher.
- These Cartesian approaches, whether
or not they finally lead to dead-ends, have generated
considerable information and knowledge which, through
its modes of production and diffusion, remains widely
scattered and any specialist can only use portions
of this diffuse cloud.
Understanding biological mechanisms
and therefore pathologies will be the major challenge
of the 21st century.
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