For all the much-vaunted scientific effort that goes into drug development, biotech companies and their scientific teams are often shining a light on only one narrow cellular target. Often a new drug intended to treat one thing triggers a cascade of events that can damage patients more than they help, which is one reason why so many developers are blindsided by unexpected events.
In order for drug developers to pull back a little and shine a light on a much broader area of the complex biology involved in drug development and disease, Harvard is drawing together investigators from a range of disciplines--including math, physics and computer sciences--in a new effort on systems pharmacology which is being heralded as a unique effort aimed at nothing less than revolutionizing the development of new drugs and overcoming the poor productivity rate that has plagued the industry.
"With this Initiative in Systems Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School is reframing classical pharmacology and marshaling its unparalleled intellectual resources to take a novel approach to an urgent problem," said Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard University, "one that has never been tried either in industry or academia."
"If you're trying to halt traffic in a city, you could say you have this one major street and you could block the traffic on this major street,'' Marc Kirschner, one of the leaders of this new project, tells the Boston Globe. "Maybe the traffic might not move as fast, but it would find a way. It might be you'd be better off picking three or five major thoroughfares and blocking them each 80 percent. But for you to make that prediction, you really first need a map.''
The Globe points out that a number of developers and institutions-such as Mount Sinai School of Medicine--are pursuing projects like these.
- check out the story from the Harvard Gazette
- here's the report from the Boston Globe