Vortrag
Systems Biology and its Role in Predictive Health and Personalized Medicine
Mittwoch 09.07.2008, 18:00 - 19:00
Vortragender
Prof. Dr. Eberhard O. Voit
Bioinformatics Colloquium
Recent advances in the natural and computational sciences have made it possible to study health and disease with a new and powerful arsenal of molecular and computational tools. The enormous potential of these tools has focused the spotlight on the possibilities of predicting health processes and personalizing treatment. Bioinformaticians have admirably managed the flood of biomedical data and made methods available for information mining and data driven analysis. However, data and their management alone will be insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of how cells or organisms function and which molecular or physiological changes might lead from health to disease. The reasons for the remaining gap in understanding are manifold but are ultimately associated with the enormous complexity of cells and organisms. A promising approach toward closing the gap in understanding is the construction of integrative mathematical and computational models. With advances in hardware and software as well as in systems analytical methods, these models are on the brink of becoming sufficiently accurate and comprehensive to yield deep insights into specific disease processes. While the current models have not yet reached this point, their potential and utility are clearly visible on the horizon. Under this premise, the presentation will suggest how models can aid our thinking about health and disease beyond the observation that one state is “normal” and the other is somehow abnormal and therefore diseased. Specifically, I will define health and disease simplexes, which represent the multi-factorial nature of health and disease and permit the characterization of interpersonal variability, genetic predisposition, life style choices, risk assessments, the investigation of reversible and irreversible trajectories from health to disease and back, and for assessments of alternative treatment strategies. I will formalize these concepts mathematically in the language of Biochemical Systems Theory, which has been used in the past for a variety of analyses of biomedical systems and also provided the first objective rationale for Cox’s proportional hazard model and the linear-logistic disease risk model of epidemiology.
Veranstalter
Bioinformatics Initiative Munich
Ansprechpartner
Prof. H.W. Mewes, TU München