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Discovery of drugs and appropriate therapeutic interventions are complex enterprises. It is inherently complex as biological systems evolved to be complex in order to cope with broad range of perturbations and to maintain various functionalities. Multiple coordinated interventions are key for successful drugs to coming decades.
The inherent difficulties lies in robustness and fragility associated with disease outbreak and progression as well as host response to therapeutic interventions.
The talk addresses issues in the current drug discovery processes, and argues that more systematic approach needs to be taken with principles behind.
One option is the use of multi-component multi-target drugs. However, it requires powerful computational approach to overcome its combinatorial explosion problems. It also requires principles that guide the discovery process. Experimental approach such as gTOW (genetic Tug-of-War) shall uncover various mechanistic issues that cause discrepancies between computational and experimental results.
At the same time, it requires systematic and well designer engineering process to make the whole enterprise successful and economically viable.
Nevertheless, lack of common platform hinders efficient development of tools that can potentially speed up drug discovery process. This talk outlines principles for systems drug discovery, addresses experimental issues, and efforts to develop unified and versatile software platform to enhance the process. |
