An essay coauthored by Andrea Califano (Chair, Department of Systems Biology) and Gideon Bosker and published in the Wall Street Journal asks whether quantitative modeling could reveal the keys for turning cancer off. They write:

• Disappointed with the slow pace of discovery and inclined to look for elegant, universal explanations for nature’s conundrums, many cancer researchers have increasingly been asking: Is there some sort of “Da Vinci Code” for cancer? And can we crack it using mathematics?
  
  Quantitative modeling has been extremely successful in disciplines as diverse as astronomy, physics, economics and computer science. Can “cancer quants”—scientists applying quantitative analyses to the landscape of cancer biology—find the answers we seek? And, if so, what would the new paradigm look like? 

The essay goes on to describe how computational methods developed in the Califano Lab are being tested in personalized N of 1 clinical trials to identify essential checkpoints in the molecular regulatory networks that sustain individual patients' tumors — as well as drugs capable of targeting them.

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