Dynamic computational modeling in the search for better breast cancer drug therapy

Breast cancer is an excellent disease paradigm for systems biology. At the time of writing, a simple PubMed search for 'breast cancer' returns nearly 99,000 hits, compared with 51,000 or 16,000 for lung and colon cancer respectively, even though in terms of mortality lung and colon cancers are responsible for four-times more deaths per annum in the UK. These figures reflect the effort and money invested in breast cancer research. It is because breast cancer research is data-rich, crowded and competitive (often perceived as a negative for clinical and basic scientific researchers) that it is such an appealing area of research for systems biologists. For systems biologists, data is currency, and they scavenge diverse and multilayered datasets, from biochemical through genomics and transcriptomics to proteomics, in order to populate computational models. We discuss how dynamic modeling can be used as a tool for predicting responses to new and existing drugs, and what needs to be done to make systems biology a useful tool in the clinic.