Further steps toward functional systems biology of cancer

Abstract

Systems biology analyses in cancer are rapidly changing from merely descriptive efforts in the high-throughput experimental works and overtly technical, calculation-centered studies in computational systems biology; toward a more functional, mechanistic paradigm. The ultimate goal of cancer systems biology nowadays is thus, unraveling the mechanisms of action, regulation and control in the complex tangle of biochemical and biophysical interactions behind cancer biology. An outstanding example of this trend is given in the paper by Kessler and coworkers (2013). On this work, the authors combine ideas from gene expression profiling for phenotypic classification (Hedenfalk, 2002; Subramanian et al., 2005), of signaling pathways (Haynes et al., 2013; Leiserson et al., 2013) and of network modularity (Hintze and Adami, 2008; Jiang et al., 2008), in order to show how molecular physiology (i.e., understanding the physiological mechanisms of disease from a molecular standpoint) may have many clues leading to better prognosis and treatment of cancer. © 2013 Hernandez-Lemus.