Are Entelos models quantitative? Are you building models that drill down to predict cellular mRNA concentrations?
Basically our models, since they’re top-down, are more intercellular than intracellular, so we’re looking at cell-to-cell communication. Yes, we’re looking at quantitative changes, so we’re saying that this is a kinetic between biology A and biology B, and this is the dose-response curve associated with this toxicity. Lots of people have qualitative pathway maps hanging on their walls. That’s a long way from actually manipulating something and understanding what the quantitative effect is on an outcome. But it’s been a bumpy road for many companies tackling modeling. Look what happened to Physiome Sciences (which was acquired by and reconstituted as Predix Pharmaceuticals). Physiome had some similar approaches to ours … The challenge to a company like Physiome is that they put a lot of their eggs in the organ [modeling] basket. They did hearts and had some moderate success in [modeling] QT prolongation as a safety assessment. The problem is, [systems biology] is tough enough as it is
