Engineering Approaches to Integrative Biology
Ingenuity and innovation in engineering, chemistry and
material sciences have been most significant drivers of systems biology.
For instance, without methods for scaling up the polymerase chain reaction,
genomics would presumably not be a very important research area today.
Bioengineering methods have begun to provide us with a growing array of
technologies for probing, sensing, imaging, and measuring biological systems
that are at once very detailed, extremely specific, and usable in vivo.
The tools supporting some of these methods are being miniaturized to the
nanoscale of molecules, thus allowing diagnoses with minute amounts of
biological materials, down to biopsies of individual cells. This scale
will render it possible to insert sensing and disease treatment devices
into the human body in an essentially non-invasive and harmless fashion.
It will soon be possible to measure hundreds or thousands of biomarkers
from a single drop of blood. The Frontiers conference will show
some of the fascinating enabling technologies that are emerging in bioengineering
as support for integrative biological systems studies.