The paradigm of drug discovery is in trouble with static output and burgeoning R&D costs. The next decade will certainly prove facinating as new ways of thinking about drug development are explored and tested. While these new methods are still yet to be determined, Systems Biology certainly has the potential to be a new useful tool in the arsenal of drug discovery.

There is growing evidence that the paradigm of developing highly specific compounds which target one cellular protein is not always valid for the treatment of disease because the cell itself possesses many interlinked pathways which act in concert to produce "system behaviours" like the circuitry of modern computers. Therefore, if a particular disease is the result of a perturbation of the cell as a system then correcting the problem will require agents that interact with the cell at a system level. Acting at a system level will mean that the agent may have to target several individual pathways simultaneously in order to correct the aberrant system.

The best way to deal with this problem is by using a Systems Biology approach. Interestingly, even Systems Biology has undergone a renaissance in terms of how it serves drug discovery. Several years back the first application of Systems Biology to drug discovery was very much based on pure computer modelling of signal transduction pathways using ordinary differential equations (ODEs). It became rapidly apparent that this type of modelling was never going to deliver the holy grail of linking intermediate cellular signalling to phenotypic response because the amount of experimental data required to educate such models was prohibitive. However, just as chemists realised several decades previously that one can bypass some of the more theoretical computation chemistry approaches for data derived from compound screening, so System Biologists have realised that it should be possible to get to phenotypic outputs via statistical models, where a particular set of cell pathway signatures are correlated with a given cellular or even clinical response. Theoretically, Systems signatures could also be used to examine drug reprofiling another major driver in the modern pharmaceutical market.

It is now becoming obvious that the best way to get cell pathway system signatures is with High Content Analysis. Since both founders of Imagen Biotech have worked closely with Systems Biologists in the past, we believe that linking our data to a system signature approach is the most powerful way of addressing some of the current R&D challenges that trouble the industry. If you are interested in exploring this facinating area further with Imagen Biotech then please do not hesitate to contact us for a meeting. We would love to partner you in developing cutting-edge approaches to modern drug discovery.