Illustration by Davide Bonazzi, courtesy of Columbia Medicine.

The cover article of the Spring 2014 issue of Columbia Medicine reports on a new, Columbia University-wide effort to harness the potential of new scientific approaches and technological developments to advance the personalized treatment of cancer and other diseases. Announced in February by Columbia President Lee Bollinger, an interdisciplinary task force has been formed to coordinate the scientific, policy, and clinical components necessary to achieve this goal. The Department of Systems Biology, including its Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and JP Sulzberger Columbia Genome Center, has been identified as a key partner in this interdisciplinary effort. As the article reports:

Rapidly evolving technologies that make DNA sequencing dramatically faster and less expensive along with new technologies to monitor virtually all aspects of cell physiology have led to the generation of unprecedented amounts of information (big data) that is starting to yield to new computational approaches and high speed computers, all of which promise to make diagnosis and treatment as patient-specific and precise as possible.

To harness the potential created by these scientific advances for the benefit of patients, [College of Physicians & Surgeons] Dean Lee Goldman, MD, has made personalized medicine a key goal of the medical school’s strategic plan. “At Columbia, we have enthusiastic consensus in support of personalized medicine—the personalized application of scientific advances to modern diagnosis and treatment, easily accessible and attentive care for the people who entrust us with their health, and personalized education for each of our individual students,” says Dr. Goldman…

At the center of Columbia’s personalized medicine effort is the new Department of Systems Biology, which brings together researchers specializing in molecular biology, genetics, computational biology and bioinformatics, structural biology, mathematics, chemistry and chemical biology, physics, computer science, and other fields. According to founding director and chair Andrea Califano, PhD, the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Systems Biology, the new department seeks to provide an in-depth, systemwide characterization of all molecular interactions. It is this systems-level approach to disease biology that can systematically identify disease drivers and druggable targets for the 90 percent of cancer patients who lack a clearly actionable genetic mutation. This has become possible only in recent years through major advances in science and technology that require a fully interdisciplinary approach.

The article describes how research by Department of Systems Biology faculty members including Dr. Califano, Nicholas Tatonetti, Brent Stockwell, and Tuuli Lappalainen, along with that of investigators in departments across the university, is contributing to this ambitious initiative. Read the complete article here.