Cancer Systems Biology Website

As biological knowledge continues to grow, searching for how physiological systems function and how they relate to a particular disease becomes ever more difficult. In order to improve the efficiency whereby potential research targets might be identified, this work features an internet portal providing access to information for directing cancer research in a methodical, systems-based approach. The database portal includes interactive tutorials and guides to link physiological systems as well as strategies to identify and select novel therapeutic and diagnostic targets in the treatment of disease based on those linked relationships. The databases include a variety of downloadable documents from publicly-available sources that have been marked as being useful in directing research under the systems-based approach. The marking system may include information on the research being done for a target, which information might include the level of the study (preliminary, tissue-based, in-human, etc.), the researcher, the study results, etc.

Benefits
Researchers at medical institutions as well as those in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries face a similar obstacle in trying to stay current on all areas of research that may provide insight to their scientific programs. This database portal provides a convenient means of organizing such information and could be divided for both public and private access. While private domains could be filled with research under current development, public sites could also be conveniently accessed to build further data relationships. The current site focuses on cancer biology but could be expanded to other biological fields. Future developments might include a software robot that retrieves information from the Internet or publicly- and privately-available sources and categorizes/indexes it by disease and physiological system. Such a system could be expanded and made available to include a fee-for-use collecting model.

Stage of Development
Beyond the current working prototype, this research is ongoing to expand the collection of data sets and improve the linkage of relationships between those data sets. Although the current site is focused on cancer related research, the methods of linking biological datasets are generic and could be expanded to other biological systems. The intellectual property status of this technology is currently under internal review.

Additional Info
*A prototype of the web site which includes links to other publicly available web sites and data sets can be viewed at https://cancersystemsbiology.utah.edu/index.html
*See also http://www.hci.utah.edu/research/bios/heichman.jsp

Inventor(s): Karen Heichman

Type of Offer: Licensing



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