Aedi Bio, LLC
With the rapid advance of modern medicine, scientists have learned that the components of life – genes and proteins - almost never work alone. They interact with each other and with other molecules in highly structured networks, similar to the complex network among the countless computers on the internet. The goal of systems biology is to transform biological and medical research by creating and using systems approaches to unravel complex biological systems, and ultimately to facilitate the transformation from the current practice of medicine to a new era of 4P Medicine - predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine.
Due to its significance in medicine, many systems biology approaches have been developed in recent years. However, there are large limitations for these conventional systems and bioinformatics approaches. The limitation of the current approaches originates from their assumption that a network is the sum of its components. In systems biology, this assumption does not always hold true. A network is a system in which the components that constitute the network come together, interacting and interdependent, to form a more complex whole unit. A network is usually much greater than the sum of all the components. Therefore, the development of a tool to provide not only the stored knowledge in systems biology, but also answers questions beyond the stored knowledge is in urgent demand.
When fully implemented, Harvest (our product name) provides not only the stored knowledge, but also answers questions beyond the stored knowledge using our real-time inference engine. Our system more easily accumulates and manages knowledge that can be efficiently reused to more effectively collect future knowledge. This accumulated knowledge, or templates, will be reused to collect more and more biological knowledge quickly and thoroughly for different genes. We can therefore leverage our suite of knowledge templates, or applications, and eventually use them across research disciplines to discover new knowledge patterns heretofore unidentifiable. Just as growing scientific knowledge helped eradicate smallpox, the bubonic plague, and polio, a greater understanding of how the body system works will contribute to the battle against such modern plagues as cancer, AIDS, and diabetes.