Systems and Synthetic Biology

Systems and synthetic biology are an emerging scientific fields that aim at system level understanding and synthesis of biological processes. This is of crucial importance in both the biotech, pharmaceutical, and bioengineering industry. In the biotech and pharmaceutical industry enhanced understanding of disease mechanisms is of vital importance to successfully find new candidate drugs and drug targets. In the bioengineering industry improved biological process knowledge is the key to better yield and product quality.

Combining model based signal processing, system identification, mechanistic models, and sensitivity analysis with novel measurement platforms provides a strong competitive edge for researchers in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Systems biology partly addresses these things and aims at elucidating the properties and function of biochemical and biological systems on a systems level, e.g., how biomolecules interact and implement various functions which cannot be understood by studying the system components in isolation.

The activities in systems biology at FCC are focused around the application and development of computational methods and mathematical models of biological systems on different levels of abstraction utilizing time resolved measurement data. The research is carried out in close cooperation with both academic and industrial partners. The in-house competences are in the area of control and dynamic systems and the group has several years of experience of both software development and application of methods from systems and control theory to projects in both the engineering and pharmaceutical industry.

Our vision is to develop means to enable researchers to delineate and understand the underlying mechanisms of a disease or phenomenon at the mechanistic level, i.e., in terms of biochemical reaction or interaction networks.

We focus on mechanistic models to map out and better understand a specific biological phenomenon or pathological condition. The systems biology group at FCC also has very close collaboration with the Swedish company InNetics, who are the developers of the systems biology software PathwayLab.

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