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Rethinking Cancer - in View of Network Biology
Abstract
Living things are built of networks upon networks upon networks. Living things make up parts of larger networks. This tells us that biology, life, emerges from relations mapped by these networks.
The most fundamental biological network is that of a living cell. If we are lucky, it contains archeological remains of the earliest networks distinguishing living from dead that emerged more the 3,5 billion years old. Maybe we can trace them? Maybe there are even remains of the preceding prebiotic networks?
Who makes the decisions in the cell? Networks constitute the immediate link between phenotype and the constituent biomolecules. “Genes do not program anything”, claims Denis Noble, Oxford1. No, they are parts of the intracellular network of all other biomolecules as well and operate in interaction with the network. Here “decision making” is a distributed process hard to envision for human brains who like to work by identifying more or less linear cause-and-effect or billiard-ball pathways.
A mutation may change the relations of the mutated proteins in the network, and thus affect phenotype. DNA and its genes are storage of blueprints for “building blocks” of the network and as such also a storage of evolutionary memory, of historical perturbations of the cell, resulting in Darwinian adaptation as well as storing successes of natural selection. The core of the network are the proteins and their mechanical and functional interactions. I will discuss cancer biology in view of these fundamentals, as well as how they might be exploited for future unprecedented drug discovery.
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Author and article information
References
Melham Tom, Bard Jonathan, Werner Eric, Noble Denis. Conceptual foundations of systems biology. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Vol. 111(2-3):55–56. 2013. Elsevier BV. [Cross Ref]