Crisp lessons for drug development from fundamental systems biology research programs
Madhusudan Natarajan,
Principal Scientist
Pfizer - Global Research and Development Center (PGRD)
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Abstract: Identifying and fixing the causes of attrition in drug discovery has been a mantra for almost a decade now. Several seemingly obvious strategies suggested as fixes for this problem include choosing the optimal target for drug design, identifying co-drugging strategies, finding the most discriminating biomarkers, etc. Interestingly, each of these approaches could easily be a descriptor of systems biology approaches and yet the adoption of systems biology methods in the industry is cautious and slow. A prominent misconception preventing the acceptance of systems biology appears to be the perception that these approaches require, or rather need, vast data-rich compendia of multivariate measurements that will be examined in hypotheses-free analysis for predictions of uncertain value. This talk will discuss crisp inferences readily utilizable for drug discovery from one such large publicly available compendium of data centered around cellular signaling in academia, and will extend these to areas where such datasets are not available. The talk will identify several methods currently being utilized successfully towards the prosecution of both small molecule and biotherapeutics targets.
Presenter Biography: Madhusudan Natarajan is a Principal Scientist at Pfizer in the
Division of Systems Biology at the Regional Technology Center in
Cambridge, MA. There, he leads a group using experimental and
computational approaches to understanding disease by contrasting
information fluxes in normal and diseased conditions.
Madhu's initial training was in Electronics and Communication
Engineering, and he went on to graduate studies in Biomedical
Engineering and Neurobiology. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern
University, IL, where he investigated sources of sympathetic rhythm
generation that form the basis of mammalian cardiovascular control.
After a short stint in biotech in NJ, Madhu was research faculty in
the department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center in Dallas, TX where he initially worked as part of a
large multi-investigator multi-university research collaboration
called the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS). His work in the
AfCS is recognized as among the first efforts to combine multivariate,
multiscale, multi-assay snapshots of signaling to yield a cohesive
picture of cross-talk in signaling networks. His subsequent work there
also examined information transduction within proteins, and engineered
and designed synthetic proteins and protein chimeras with novel function.
Online Presentation: http://lifescience.planetconnect.com/ppt/LSPrinceton/tuesday/MADHU_NATARAJAN.ppt
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