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| | New NIAID Program Aims to Model Immune Responses and Key Infectious Diseases |
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date: Jul 13th 2006 10:48
page: 1 | 2
A new program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), aims to better understand the complex biochemical networks that regulate the interactions between infectious organisms and
The Program in Systems Immunology and Infectious Disease Modeling (PSIIM) will employ a powerful new approach called computational systems biology to develop a deeper understanding of how pathogens cause disease and how the immune system responds to them.
“Understanding the daunting complexity of biological systems is the greatest challenge and at the cutting-edge of science in the 21st century,” says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. “The creation of this program will strengthen the intramural research program here on the NIH campus.”
The wealth of information gleaned about the human genome in recent years has identified many of the genes, proteins and other molecules involved in various biological systems. But understanding how these pieces work together to produce the complex physiological and pathological behavior of cells and organisms is not well understood. The goal of the PSIIM, which is a component of NIAID’s Division of Intramural Research (DIR) under the leadership of immunologist Ronald N. Germain, M.D., Ph.D., is to create a way to ask how whole systems of molecules, cells and tissues interact during an immune response or when confronted with an infectious agent.
“The idea of the PSIIM,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., “is to use systems biology to allow scientists to ask very big questions they may not have been able to fully address even a few years ago — such as how infectious organisms invade human cells, how the toxins they produce cause cell and tissue destruction and how these pathogens evade or manipulate the immune response.”
“Once we understand these interactions, we can make strategic decisions about how to interfere with infectious disease pathology or how to direct immune responses to better fight infections,” says DIR Director Kathryn C. Zoon, Ph.D., adding that these new insights can serve as the starting point for the design of new drugs to treat diseases or the development of new vaccines.
By creating computer models of complex molecular interaction networks, PSIIM investigators will be able to simulate the biology of cells, tissues and, eventually, organisms. The program will also use state-of-the-art experimental approaches to determine how closely these simulations predict real behavior. As the models improve, scientists should gain the ability to predict how drugs and other interventions will affect a cell or organism and whether such treatments will be tolerated by the host while they fight the infectious agent. Although most of the studies will be conducted with less dangerous pathogens, special facilities in the new C. W. Bill Young Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at NIH will enable PSIIM scientists to examine such questions with microbes that cause diseases such as anthrax, virulent forms of influenza, tularemia and plague. The program will encourage collaboration between NIAID researchers and other scientists from both inside and outside NIH in efforts to better understand infectious diseases and the immune system.
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article 'New NIAID Program Aims to Model Immune Responses and Key Infectious Diseases' source is National Institutes of Health - U.S. Department of Health, visit source site:
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