Developing predictive models of human disease with system biology is a fascinating approach to put biology back into drug discovery. Merrimack Pharmaceuticals is dveloping drugs for cancer using protein and antibody microarray technologies to build detailed computational models. Another company called BioSeek has developed quantitative automated primary human cell systems modeling pathological conditions. Are these complex technologies going to be able to really predict how human body is reacting to drugs, diseases, etc? shouldn't we at the end use animal models and eventually humans to make sure a drug works properly?

Yes you are right in a way, we should definetly reduce our dependence on animals, but are do these complicated softwares predict the scenario in the body. At the end of the day, I think we should depend on the softwares for initial analysis, but ultimately nothing substitutes animal data.

This computational biology may be one way to further confirm their results found in the animal model. But it is hard to depend only on this without doing any animal studies.

Roshan said:

Developing predictive models of human disease with system biology is a fascinating approach to put biology back into drug discovery. Merrimack Pharmaceuticals is dveloping drugs for cancer using protein and antibody microarray technologies to build detailed computational models. Another company called BioSeek has developed quantitative automated primary human cell systems modeling pathological conditions. Are these complex technologies going to be able to really predict how human body is reacting to drugs, diseases, etc? shouldn't we at the end use animal models and eventually humans to make sure a drug works properly?