A Cell Simulator Platform: The Cell Collective

Rather than applying relatively simplistic strategies for direct intervention at intuitively obvious sites, the ability to interrogate biological networks in a systemic context in order to search for nonintuitive approaches cannot be underestimated. Current and future discoveries in quantitative analysis will be difficult or even impossible to apply in the absence of large-scale, accurate models of biochemical/biological systems. We hope that as models in the Cell Collective become more comprehensive, they will provide new opportunities not only to identify and rank individual potential drug targets but also to explore the possibilities of drug repurposing and combinatorial therapies. Rational drug design/discovery is a major problem that has yet to succumb to the power of modern laboratory science. It is likely that more tools will be required to attack this problem, including new ones such as systems and computational approaches. The merging of the laboratory and quantitative analysis has the potential for exciting synergies, and the Cell Collective is designed as a platform on which these synergies can become a reality.