The 'Virtual Human'
(June 13th 2008) Once the human genome has been deciphered, Systems Biologists will reach out to 'map' humans as a whole. Within the next 30 years they plan to create a virtual functioning model of a human. Melanie Estrella reports on their ambitious enterprise.
At the beginning of the 21st century we find ourselves at the start of the post-genomic era. Various "-omic" approaches are coughing up piles of data about the genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome, but a meaningful interpretation of these results often seems to be lacking. Hence the emergence of Systems Biology, a field which intends to take advantage of the huge amounts of generated data, combining it with mathematical and computational analysis in order to assign biological functions. This scientific newcomer has evolved rapidly and plenty of researchers, hoping to impress funding agencies, have already thrust the fashionable buzzwords into their proposals.
Systems Biology focuses on the dynamic processes of life, trying to describe complex pathways, structures and networks of genes and molecules in order to establish predictive models. Its ultimate goal is to comprehend complete cells in action. At present, this novel field is in its infancy, struggling with a plethora of obstacles. New methods must be developed, highly interdisciplinary groups, institutes and consortia have to be teamed up and young scientists need to be recruited and trained appropriately. Furthermore, a satisfactory time resolution of the examined processes has to be accomplished as a prerequisite for designing efficient biological models.
However, none of these hurdles seems to dampen the spirit of the pioneering Systems Biologists that participated this February at the "International Workshop on Future Challenges for Systems Biology" held in Tokyo. "Due to the recent advances in the field", they declared, "the time is now ripe to initiate a grand challenge project to create over the next thirty years a comprehensive, molecules-based, multi-scale, computational model of the human ('the Virtual Human'), capable of simulating and predicting, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the consequences of most of the perturbations that are relevant to healthcare."
The workshop was jointly organized by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council of the UK (BBSRC), with the aim of promoting this collaborative project between Japan, the UK, and selected centres in other countries. One of the leading heads of the Virtual Human project is Hiroaki Kitano, director of the Systems Biology Institute in Tokyo, also known for his previous involvement in developing the Sony robot dog, AIBO.
If we consider some of the current ongoing projects in Systems Biology - analysis of receptor tyrosine kinase signalling, photosynthesis, or modelling entire model organisms at the level of E. coli and yeast - then the intention of the so-called "Tokyo Declaration" sounds rather ambitious. But then, that's what everybody thought when the first rockets were build in the fifties to send men to the moon, or when the Human Genome Project took off. Subsequently men did land on the moon and the human genome was decoded. However, we are still a long way from 'conquering' space or understanding the complexities of the human genome.
Looking at the myriad molecules contained within the human body from every possible angle to establish a virtual human model that could be of practical value to the pharmaceutical industry may not be achievable within the next three decades. In fact it seems extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, the project might act as a valuable catalyst, fuelling research that aims to describe life's complexity with an unprecedented accuracy.
