MOAC Events Calendar
14-15 December 2009 - Organisers: Paul J Thornalley, Anatoly Shmygol, Hugo A van den Berg
The coming decades will see the advent of molecular medicine in the daily routine of clinical practice, with customized care based on patient genotyping and genetic recombination targeting the patient’s own cells and tissues. The success of such developments will depend critically on the ability to predict reliably how perturbations by either the disease or therapy at the molecular level will affect the behaviour at the level of the whole system. This calls for a renewed focus on the individual as an integrated dynamical system, in which links are forged between levels of biological organisation, from molecules, cells, and tissues up to organ systems.
Various deep mathematical problems are engendered by the need to establish inter-level connections that are, in some suitable sense, functionally meaningful. The typical problem is to characterize the functional consequences at the higher level of the structures modelled at the lower level, e.g. the translation of molecular heterogeneity of cell-cell contacts to the statistics of the fluctuations of a functional parameter at the systemic level. Such problems call for sophisticated statistical sampling techniques. Another example is the reduction of dynamic degrees of freedom as one passes to coarser spatiotemporal scales, for instance, from a network of endocrine interactions to the input-output behaviour at the whole-organism level.
We will discuss novel mathematical techniques which are being developed to address these problems, with an emphasis on a small number of selected model systems which can serve as case-studies for an in-depth discussion: (i) regulation of epitope recognition in the immune system, which could hold the key to a cure for auto-immune disease, aids and cancer; (ii) regulation activation patterns in smooth muscle cells and the myocardium, focussing on cell-to-tissue signalling; (iii) regulation of energy intake and expenditure, which we need to understand better in order to control diabetes and obesity, with a focus on lipoprotein metabolism, nutrigenomics linking diet and health, and trans-fatty acids impact on the risk of vascular disease.
Confirmed speakers:
Martin Adiels (Gothenburg) — Ellen Baake (Bielefeld) — Michael Berridge (Cambridge) — Carla Ferreri (Bologna) — Kevin Hall (Bethesda) — Leighton T. Izu (California) — Pierre de Meyts (Gentofte) — Ben van Ommen (Zeist) — David A. Price (Bethesda & Cardiff) — Barbara M. Sanborn (Colorado) — Kenton M. Sanders (Nevada) — Andrew K. Sewell (Cardiff) — Withrow Gil Wier (Maryland)