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Over the past year, I have been working on a video for clinicians. I am a postdoc in the University of Virginia's Biomedical Engineering department, which houses a core group of systems biologists, many of whom are part of an NIH-funded Cancer Systems Biology Center. Often, the Outreach Cores of such Centers have a hard time determining how to make an impact. A past Center that I was a part of (at Vanderbilt) had some great events geared towards early career grad students and postdocs that introduced them to systems biology, and a “hackathon” for collaborative coding on problems in cancer systems biology that are still hard to solve. However, one audience that doesn't tend to be reached with these events is clinicians—- those doctors actually seeing cancer patients.

In my experience, the clinicians who are interested in systems biology don't need to be persuaded that it is useful—they already believe so, and just need a way to “get involved.” Many of them are deeply involved in research themselves, alongside seeing patients, so the interest in cancer systems biology isn't so far from their day-to-day work. However, there is a large population of clinicians who don't know what systems biology is, or why it might be useful. This was the target audience of the video that I produced.

Reading this post, you might be wondering yourself—“what exactly is systems biology anyway?” As I explain in the video below in a two-part definition:

The video I made is geared towards explaining that answer, as well as detailing why a complex disease such as cancer needs systems approaches. Finally, the video takes a look at how systems approaches are applied in practice. It is here in the video that I interviewed Dr. Gatenby, who spearheaded the Integrative Mathematical Oncology program at Moffitt Cancer Center. This led me to think a lot more about how systems biology and mathematical oncology align. After polling other members of the MathOnco newsletter team, I've created this Venn Diagram of the similarities and differences between the two:

I'd love for you to take a look at the video that I created, and I welcome any feedback! Feel free to share with your own scientific community as well.