Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

Abstract

Cancer remains one of the most challenging and devastating diseases known to mankind. Its negative impact on the quality of life and national economies constitute a world-wide health crisis, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). While much progress has been made in our understanding of the disease along with corresponding breakthroughs in some specific treatments, further advances remain a major challenge to the scientific community. What we have learned is that cancer is a very diverse and multi-component disease involving not just one mutation or one cell but a finely orchestrated system of signaling networks and cellular niches interacting to enable the cancer to develop, metastasize, and survive. The speaker will outline the challenges of cancer research and recent activities within the scientific community and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to address these challenges using a multi-disciplinary, systems biology approach.