Biology, driven by data
Cells are incredibly complicated machines with thousands of interacting parts — and disruptions to any of those interactions can cause disease. Tracing those connections to seek the root cause of disease is a daunting task, but it is one that MIT biological engineer Ernest Fraenkel relishes. His lab takes a systematic approach to the problem: By comparing datasets that include thousands of events inside healthy and diseased cells, they can try to figure out what has gone awry in cells that are not functioning properly. “The central challenge of this field is how you take all those different kinds of data to get a coherent picture of what’s going on in a cell, what is wrong in a diseased cell, and how you might fix it,” says Fraenkel, an associate professor of biological engineering. This type of computational modeling of biological interactions, known as systems biology, can help to reveal possible new drug...