The Long Road from Discovery to Design

Lockheed Martin does not discovery fighter jets. Ferrari dose not discover F1 race cars. Increasingly, the pharmaceutical industry does not discover drugs. Novel therapies are engineered. Target selection is dependent on reverse engineering of complex physiologic systems. Molecules are designed to display desired characteristics via knowledge of 3D structural chemistry. Patient selection, trial design, and combination therapies are increasingly dependent on causal (physiologic-based) mathematical models. Today I will provide some insights gained during my 20 years as a systems modeler then describe some recent finding from our systems oncology group focusing on lesion-to-lesion heterogeneity in patients with advanced cancer.