With this new computer model, we can carry out simulated experiments in seconds that would take many weeks to perform in the laboratory.
- Bertie Gottgens
The human body produces over 2.5 million new blood cells during every second of our adult lives, but how this process is controlled remains poorly understood. Around 30,000 new patients each year are diagnosed with cancers of the blood each year in the UK alone. These cancers, which include leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma, occur when the production of new blood cells gets out of balance, for example if the body produces an overabundance of white blood cells.
Biomedical scientists from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research collaborated for the past 2 years with computational biologists at Microsoft Research and Cambridge University’s Department of Biochemistry. This interdisciplinary team of researchers have developed a computer model to help gain a better understanding of the control mechanisms that keep blood production normal. The details are published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
“With this new computer model, we can carry out simulated experiments in seconds that would take many weeks to perform in the laboratory, dramatically speeding up research into blood development and the genetic mutations that cause leukaemia,” says Professor Bertie Gottgens whose research team is based at the University’s Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.
Dr Jasmin Fisher from Microsoft Research and the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge says: “This is yet another endorsement of how computer programs empower us to gain better understanding of remarkably complicated processes. What is ground-breaking about the current work is that we show how we can automate the process of building such programs based on raw experimental data. It provides us with a blueprint to develop computer models relevant to other human diseases including common cancers such as breast and colon cancer.”
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Image: SEM image of normal red blood cells, computer-coloured red
Credit: E.M.Unit, Royal Free Hospital
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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