Scientific Insights
National Brain Tumor Society's Scientific Insights is intended to provide the brain tumor research community with a forum in which to respond to some of today’s most intriguing questions. We hope these questions will stimulate conversation and will disseminate information to all those interested.
Participants are expected to keep comments respectful and to honor the purpose of the forum: to promote an exchange of ideas between researchers, scientists, and medical professionals about a particular topic. Please read the terms and conditions for more information. Please note you must be logged in to post a comment.
This month's question
Dr. Califano spoke about systems chemical biology at NBTS's Systems Biology Symposium.
He has taken an integrated view of how different metabolic layers of regulation in the cell -including transcriptional, post transcriptional and post translational-all work together, not in isolation, to actually implement a particular phenotype. He noted that a lot of interactions at this level become integrated into bottlenecks that one can target in terms of biomarkers and actionable therapeutic targets.
Dr. Califano reflected, "Current approaches to biomarker discovery are really broken. There are very few biomarkers that have been validated and I think that this is because we look at genes that have the biggest change. We need to look at the genes that are causally related representation of the phenotype" to develop new combination therapies.
Please comment.