Stuart A. Kauffman

Director, Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics
University of Calgary

Kauffmann is the Director of the new Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) at the University of Calgary. He is the holder of the iCORE Chair in Biocomplexity and Informatics. He is also an external professor at the Sante Fe Institute.

One View of Systems Biology

We have entered the post genomic era. The genes lie before us. How they and their products interact within and between cells to give rise to normal embryonic development and in diseases such as cancer, remain mind-boggling problems for the coming decades. I have recently assumed direction of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, Alberta. I will describe the founding directions of this Institute, both theory and experiment. These include "the ensemble approach" to understanding genetic regulatory networks, solving the "inverse problem of using data from gene expression arrays and other sources to infer the regulatory connections among genes and their products and the logic driving the dynamical behavior of the network. At the experimental level, one confronts the central problem of cell differentiation. Here the genomic network displays temporal patterns of changing gene activities that are hopefully well suited to infer the answers to the structure and logic of genetic networks. The same patterns of cell differentiation underlie fascinating metaplasias and transdifferentiation, in which supposedly terminally differentiated cell types alter to quite different cell types, patterns of stem cell behavior, and the surprising property of a number of cancers to sometimes differentiate into normal, non-malignant, cell types. Our Institute plans to explore these phenomena and to screen highly diverse collections of small organic molecules to find those that can control stem cell differentiation for tissue engineering, and induce cancer cells to differentiate into normal cells. We are but one institute, and seek wide collaboration with others on these fundamental problems.