Mats Jirstrand
Fraunhofer-Chalmers Research Centre for Industrial Mathematics
Göteborg
Systems biology is an emerging scientific field that aims at
system level understanding of biological processes. This understanding is
of crucial importance in both the biotech, pharmaceutical, and
bioengineering industry. In the biotech and pharmaceutical industry
enhanced understanding of disease mechanisms is of vital importance to
successfully find new candidate drugs and drug targets. In the
bioengineering industry improved biological process knowledge is the key
to better yield and product quality.
In this talk we will give a brief introduction to systems biology from a
systems theory point of view. In particular, we will discuss how concepts
and tools from system identification (to build mathematical models of
dynamic systems based on measured data) can be applied to guide the
mathematical modeling process. The process is iterative in nature but the
work can often be divided into a number of phases such as
physical/biochemical modeling, model reduction, identifiability analysis,
experiment design, and parameter estimation. We will cover each step and
illustrate their applications and challenges.