December 15, 2003 | Before it can tell customers like Johnson & Johnson whether a hypothetical drug might alleviate diabetes, Entelos engineers such as Dave Polidori, director of metabolic diseases for in silico R&D, have to quantify precisely how the liver manufactures glycogen. The Entelos team begins with textbook biological pathways and facts about the rates of production of various compounds affecting the process. The diabetes model has roughly 300 variables, each of which has half-a-dozen functions like the one highlighted here. Furthermore, each function has a handful of subfunctions.
How Entelos renders metabolism in mathematical terms
Entelos strives to create a model that reflects a physiological process with as much biological fidelity as possible—without unnecessary complexity. As the model is developed, different components are added and subtracted. Proprietary scientific data can easily be inserted into any component of the model, and the new results shown only to the supplier of the data.
Source: Bio·IT World, adapted from Entelos data
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