Fuzzy intervention in biological phenomena

An important objective of modeling biological phenomena is to develop therapeutic intervention strategies to move an undesirable state of a diseased network toward a more desirable one. Such transitions can be achieved by the use of drugs to act on some genes/metabolites that affect the undesirable behavior. Due to the fact that biological phenomena are complex processes with nonlinear dynamics that are impossible to perfectly represent with a mathematical model, the need for model-free nonlinear intervention strategies that are capable of guiding the target variables to their desired values often arises. In many applications, fuzzy systems have been found to be very useful for parameter estimation, model development and control design of nonlinear processes. In this paper, a model-free fuzzy intervention strategy (that does not require a mathematical model of the biological phenomenon) is proposed to guide the target variables of biological systems to their desired values. The proposed fuzzy intervention strategy is applied to three different biological models: a glycolytic-glycogenolytic pathway model, a purine metabolism pathway model, and a generic pathway model. The simulation results for all models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.