Dr. Gunnar Cedersund - FRIAS LIFENET Seminar

Progress and challenges in systems biology studies of type II diabetes

This project gives a basic introduction to systems biology, but also  takes up two specific aspects: handling of complexity and multi-level  modelling of glucose homoestasis.

The first aspect, handling of complexity and over-parametrisation, is a  general problem shared by almost all systems biology studies. A key  issue with this problem is that many model predictions are the result of  arbitrary choices on large parameter manifolds, even though the simulation-data  agreement is good. However, as I will stress in this talk, some model properties  are not arbitrary, and I have developed techniques to identify such  uniquely identifiable predictions in over-parametrised models, which I denote core predictions.

The second aspect deals with concrete projects related to type II diabetes.

I will review some recent developments in the characterisation of the insulin  signalling network as well as attempts to integrate such insights and models  on the cellular and organ levels, into models and insights for the whole-body level.

As you will see, some of these hierarchical models are now also starting to make their  way into the pharmaceutical developments.