Systems biology: Potential to improve decision making in pharmaceutical development

On October 5, 2006, the New England Systems Biology Association held its first annual meeting at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts. The meeting was organized under the title "Systems Biology in Drug Discovery" and was devoted to the presentation of current status and advances in this new and ever-expanding field in medical sciences. It brought together biologists, biochemists, physicians, physicists and engineers, as well as leaders in biopharmaceutical industry interested in this field of science and its possible impact on anticancer drug discovery. The meeting consisted of two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and a panel discussion at noon. Each session hosted four speakers and a panel discussion featuring five discussants. Each session also included keynote speakers. Systems biology can help to identify disease-specific molecules and drug-specific targets. This is especially useful as a new tool in diagnostic approaches and drug discovery. Using specific techniques like gene profiling, marker detection and kinase-specific substrate definition, and combining them with large databases and computational methods it is possible to look at the organism as a complex association of gene activation and control networks, and their products, and thus gain better and more realistic insights into disease processes and into drug mechanisms.