Cancer systems biology: a network modeling perspective

By P. Kreeger, Douglas A. Lauffenburger. Carcinogenesis, 2009

382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cancer is now appreciated as not only a highly heterogenous pathology with respect to cell type and tissue origin but also as a disease involving dysregulation of multiple pathways governing fundamental cell processes such as death, proliferation, differentiation and migration. Thus, the activities of molecular networks that execute metabolic or cytoskeletal processes, or regulate these by signal transduction, are altered in a complex manner by diverse genetic mutations in concert with the environmental context. A major challenge therefore is how to develop actionable understanding of this multivariate dysregulation, with respect both to how it arises from diverse genetic mutations and to how it may be ameliorated by prospective treatments. While high-throughput experimental platform technologies ranging from genomic sequencing to transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic profiling are now commonly used for molecular-level characterization of tumor cells and surrounding tissues, the resulting data sets defy straightforward intuitive interpretation with respect to potential therapeutic targets or the effects of perturbation. In this review article, we will discuss how significant advances can be obtained by applying computational modeling approaches to elucidate the pathways most critically involved in tumor formation and progression, impact of particular mutations on pathway operation, consequences of altered cell behavior in tissue environments and effects of molecular therapeutics.

Subfields: Computational Theory and Mathematics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af5ebae98521460baa84c0621468a5b011beb9bf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computational Theory and Mathematics

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Network-based stratification of tumor mutations (2013, background): “It is widely appreciated that cancer is a disease not of individual mutations, nor of genes, but of combinations of genes acting in molecular networks corresponding to hallmark processes such as cell proliferation and apoptosis 20,21 .”
Systems biology approaches for advancing the discovery of effective drug combinations (2015, background): “Given the complexity of the signaling networks controlling systemic diseases such as cancer, computational models of cell signaling pathways are important tools for increasing understanding of pathological signaling and prioritizing targets to test experimentally [21].”