AVS 54th International Symposium
    Symposium Plenary Lecture Monday Sessions
       Session SP-MoL

Invited Paper SP-MoL1
NanoSystems Biology and New Technologies for in vitro & in vivo Diagnostics of Cancer

Monday, October 15, 2007, 12:00 pm, Room 6C

Session: Symposium Plenary Lecture
Presenter: J.R. Heath, The California Institute of Technology
Correspondent: email address not available

The emerging world of personalized, preventative, predictive, and participatory (P4) medicine will likely be enabled by the developing field of systems biology. Systems biology and P4 medicine both data driven and, accordingly, both require new tools for making large numbers of measurements rapidly, quantitatively, and at practically zero cost. Microfluidics, chemical, and nanotechnologies will revolutionize our ability to generate comprehensive data sets that span from individual cells to patients, and will allow us to build multiparameter analysis tools (quantitating genes, proteins, and cells) for achieving an informative in vitro disease diagnosis, as well as in vivo molecular imaging probes for spatially localizing specific diseases. However, the requirement that the measurements be done at extremely low cost (information becomes the commodity of value) imposes severe restrictions on these emerging technologies. Using cancer as a theme, I will describe the state-of-the-art in terms of network models of human diseases, and I will describe how those models may be harnessed for information that can impact the clinical care of cancer. I will then describe a suite of multiparameter diagnostics technologies that we are developing in my lab in concert with other groups, with both near and far term applications targeted.