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Cells are a natural first choice to study the complex and dynamic relationships that permeate biology. They also hold great promise in revolutionary therapeutics of the future for currently incurable diseases (witness the promise of stem cells). Several techniques have been developed to gather information in a massive, high-throughput or high-content fashion. However, progress is impeded by the lack of sophisticated modeling tools to integrate, analyze, extract and interpret the diverse data in the context of prior knowledge of the entire system.
Modeling Tools
Supplementing traditional genomics-centered bioinformatics approaches, CFDRC is developing biological pathway/mechanism driven, quantitative tool called qCABIN (quantitative Collocation and Analysis of Biological Interaction Networks), integrating data from microarrays with protein/metabolite measurements and facilitating rational, hypothesis-driven investigations in today’s data driven world. Our computational tool development effort focuses on multiple aspects of this challenging problem, including data management, public/private database access and sophisticated systems-level analyses.
We are also developing COBI, a platform for spatial/distributed modeling of cellular function.
Application in Toxicology and Pharmacology
While these tools are broadly relevant in a variety of applications, particular sub-systems under research focus comprise cellular signal transduction, metabolism and growth/death/differentiation. Our applications are focused on the following therapeutic areas
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