Systems Biology Approaches to New Vaccine Development

Advances in instrumentation, informatics, and biotechnology have enabled us to measure biological processes and their components on a massive scale. We can rapidly and effectively identify genes, proteins, metabolites, and other components of living cells, their forms, expression, quantity, and change over time or under some stimulus. Understanding the components of living cells is important and these details can provide information about their presence or absence, function, interactions, and we can establish correlations between genes and proteins and certain physiological states. Properties of individual genes and proteins (and other components) alone do not provide insights into their collective function. To understand biological function at cellular, tissue, or organism level we need to understand the behavior and relationships of all components of the observed system, their interconnectivity, and dynamics of change of their relationships [1, 2]. To understand systemic behavior of biological systems we need to study four major properties: system structure, systems dynamics, control mechanisms, and the underlying model [2]. System structure focuses on gene and protein interactions, and resulting networks and pathways [3]. Such maps are largely static and it