The Systems Biology Center New York is headed by Ravi Iyengar PhD, Director and Principal Investigator.
The Systems Biology Center New York is one of the National Centers for Systems Biology funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). Researchers and educators from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU, Stony Brook University (SUNY), City College of New York (CUNY), National Centre for Biological Sciences (India), and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center form the Systems Biology Center New York. The Center is organized as three major sections: 1) Education and Outreach Core (EOC); 2) Experimental and Computational Core (ECC) and 3) Research Projects. All of the research projects have opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. The research activities of the Center form a continuum with our education and outreach activities that include pre- and postdoctoral training, a summer undergraduate research program focused on recruiting underrepresented minority groups and training for educators.
SBCNY investigators want to understand how the effects of molecular interactions are propagated across scales of organization from cells to tissues and organs affecting physiology and pathophysiology. We posit that the dynamic organization of motifs (regulatory loops) within multi-scale networks provides the basis for propagation of effects across scales from molecules to cells to tissues. We study drug action at a genomic scale to understand and predict adverse events. We are actively engaged in the development of the new discipline of Systems Pharmacology.
The goals of the Systems Biology Center New York are to develop and disseminate approaches that provide a mechanistic understanding of how molecular interactions within regulatory networks in cells lead to the physiological function of tissues and organs, and how therapeutic agents affect cellular networks to alter pathophysiological states i.e. "the therapeutic implications of the design logic of scalability in mammalian systems".
The research focus of SBCNY is on the development and analysis of scalable models to identify regulatory patterns and how they are reconfigured by drugs. Such reconfiguration may result in therapy for a targeted pathophysiology while producing unanticipated adverse events. One of the goals of Systems Pharmacology is to develop algorithms to predict adverse events in a personalized and reliable manner. Our computational models originate from experimentally measured interactions and parameters, and the predictions of models are used to develop experiments that shed light on the design logic of the system to better understand how organ level physiology arises from cellular organization and genomic variations. We anticipate that such understanding will enable the development of network based polypharmacology and the prediction of adverse event risk on an individual basis.
SBCNY is supported by grant number P50GM071558 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.