[alicexzhang]

Hi there - thanks for the interest! For a more technical dissection of some of the genomics approaches we employ to identify neurodegenerative disease targets, check out these reviews:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/nature0... http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v16/n8/pdf/nrg3934.pdf

[mswen]

I don't currently have access to those publications and not willing to pay just to read these articles but from the titles, abstracts and citations it sounds like basically you are taking a systems biology and GWAS approach?

The Institute for Systems Biology has been around since 2000. I remember interviewing people in an internal systems biology group at one of the largest pharma companies in the world in 2004 and writing about their work. Admittedly, they were a small unit intended to drive innovation within discovery at that pharma. By 2007 it had been at least tried in most major pharma companies and John Russell was writing about the Awkward Adolescence of Systems Biology.

http://www.bio-itworld.com/issues/2007/sept/cover-story/

Even if your characterization that large pharma prefer a different approach is mostly accurate it is a substantial disservice to the intelligence and hard work of hundreds of scientists who have worked on applying systems biology to the study of disease and treatments.

Maybe I am over-reacting to this article and your video ...but from 2000 to 2004 I heard so many biotech and related software executives tell me that their company was going to solve these same discovery and development problems. Most faded into oblivion, others found a useful niche and a few got targets identified and development started and were acquired by a large pharma to bring them to market.

I sincerely hope that you have discovered a new approach to system biology that will in fact provide breakthroughs. If you have something great let it stand on its own merits; there is no need to misrepresent the hard work and investments of other scientists or the companies they work for.

[chenja]

I really appreciate your feedback and of course we have studied a lot of what worked (and mostly, didn't work) in systems biology over the past decade, but the field has shifted dramatically since 2004. A lot more data is available, and experiments are designed much more carefully nowadays. In fact, the thing we worry about most is that the field still isn't rigorous enough and the quality of the data still isn't good enough to translate into druggable targets. And we don't intend to belittle the work of scientists who really laid the foundation for what we are trying to do today, but surprisingly few of the big pharma companies we talked to have active systems biology programs for neurological diseases (we have also learned about others, like at Janssen, that are just getting started). I think it's not a question of if systems biology will lead to new therapies, but rather when the methods and field are mature enough.

Also regarding articles, please email me at [e-mail] and I will send you PDF versions to read.

[chuie]

Keep in mind that this article was not written by the founders of Verge Genomics, but by a journalist who "writes about internet culture, social networks, and consumer-facing technology." So they are probably going to use speech that will make the more science/biotech literate person bristle.