ABSTRACT
Beyond infectious diseases, systems approaches are perhaps most valuable to dissect cancer—undeniably, cancer represents a very complex system-level dysfunction, with cross-talks between several signalling, metabolic, and regulatory pathways, interactions between various types of cells and the immune system, and so on. Indeed, cancer has been referred to as a “systems biology disease”. Metabolic modelling has also been widely used to study cancers. Dynamic models have provided insights into some of the key processes underlying cancer metastasis and progression, viz. epithelial–mesenchymal transition and the plasticity of these processes, which are central to cancer cell proliferation. Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) is the application of systems-level modelling approaches to extend classic pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) models. Overall, QSP brings a systems-level perspective to the classic PK/PD models, and enable the prediction of drug dosage regimens or drug–drug interactions. The PK/PD models are typically dynamic models, based on ordinary differential equations.
