Reflecting on building quantitative systems pharmacology models from scratch

Abstract

Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) is an emerging field where mechanistic mathematical models are used by the pharmaceutical industry to develop new drug therapies. My first real PhD job was with one of the commercial pioneers in the QSP space: Entelos, Inc. At Entelos, we creating QSP models from scratch based on the available literature, which requires reading a lot of papers. In the 5 years that I was at Entelos, I had read close to 3000 papers. In reflecting back on these experiences, here I will discuss some observations related to signal integration, heterocellular signaling within tissues, and observational bias that still apply to building QSP models based on the scientific literature.