Beyond genetics: awakening new treatments with systems biology

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What is systems biology? Working with systems biology Hiroaki Kitano – founder of SBI

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Hiroaki Kitano – founder of SBI

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Victorian Systems Biology Symposium

When: 4pm – 5pm, Thursday 19 September Where: AMREP lecture theatre , 75 Commercial Rd, Prahran RSVP: info@sbiaustralia.org by Monday 16 September

The next step in personalised medicine will come from focussing on our body clocks according to Hiroki Ueda, a rising star in systems biology from RIKEN and the University of Tokyo.

Hiroki Ueda is using the mammalian circadian clock as a self-contained model for the study of a biological system. In addition to its advantages as a research model, he says our body clock is intimately associated with metabolic and hormonal cycles, including sleep disorders.

Last year Hiroki and his colleagues demonstrated a way of assessing a person’s body time taking just two blood samples 12 hours apart, and measuring the levels of as many oscillating metabolites as possible.

The concept is inspired by Carolus Linnaeus’ flower clock. “Each flower has different timing for opening and closing,” said Hiroki. Linnaeus reasoned that if he knew when a range of flowers opened and closed in a day, he could create a garden that could tell the time. “Likewise,” Hiroki said, “each metabolite has different timing, so I applied this concept to the human body.”

At the symposium Hiroki will discuss the challenges of understanding the logic of biological networks. He’ll explain how he is using systems and synthetic biology to understand the behaviour of circadian clocks.

The symposium will be facilitated by Garry Jennings, Director of Baker IDI who will lead a discussion about the potential implications of Hiroki’s work in personalised medicine and in other biological systems.

The logic of biological networks is difficult to elucidate without (1) comprehensive identification of network structure, (2) prediction and validation based on quantitative measurement and perturbation of network behavior, and (3) design and implementation of artificial networks of identified structure and observed dynamics.

Mammalian circadian clock system is such a complex and dynamic system consisting of complicatedly integrated regulatory loops and displaying the various dynamic behaviors including i ) endogenous oscillation with about 24-hour period, ii ) entrainment to the external environmental changes (temperature and light cycle), and iii ) temperature compensation over the wide range of temperature. In this symposium, I will take a mammalian circadian clock as an example, and introduce the systems- and synthetic-biological approaches for understanding of biological timings.

Dr Ueda is head of the systems biology laboratory at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB). He’s also the head of their synthetic biology laboratory and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Medicine and Faculty of Medicine, The University of Tokyo.

Still early in his career, Hiroki has completed both his MD and PhD at the University of Tokyo, and also spent time working as a researcher for Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical and Sony Computer Science Laboratories.

He’s has worked both in computer science — training under Hiroki Kitano — and in the wet lab, learning about “high-throughput ‘omics” technologies.

His current research interests include systems and synthetic biology of biological timings.