Scope

One of the greatest challenges in biomedicine is the Translational Dilemma: the inability to effectively and efficiently translate the ever-increasing basic knowledge about the pathophysiology of diseases into effective clinical therapeutics. There are multiple reasons for the “Valley of Death” of drug development, including the gap between the representational fidelity of pre-clinical experimental models and clinical disease and an inability to account for the true heterogeneity of clinical populations. We posit that the use of Translational Systems Biology within the drug development pipeline will increase the efficiency of crossing the “Valley of Death” and aim to promote this goal within this section. Thus, manuscripts published within the Translational Systems Biology and In Silico Trials section should address the challenge of bridging these gaps through the use of dynamic mathematical and computational models to:

• Abstract disease processes

• Represent the pharmacologic impact of drugs on diseases mechanistically and quantitatively

• Link pre-clinical cell and animal models to the human disease setting via computational modeling

• Simulate individual human responses (“digital twins”)

• Perform simulation experiments that mimic clinical trials or clinical populations

The following types of submissions are not appropriate for this section: work that focuses solely on pre-clinical models; descriptive network models without some dynamic representation of biological mechanisms; machine learning/artificial intelligence or other statistical models that focus only on diagnosis and prognosis without some representation of potential interventions.

Submission

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