Dr. Greg Maguire. The Promise Of Stem Cell-Based Systems Biology Therapeutics: Mimicking Mother Nature To Produce The Most Advanced Healing Products On The Market

Dr. Maguire spoke at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine in February, 2014 about the basis of S2RM® Technology and the high level safety and efficacy profiles that result in the BRS product line. Dr. Maguire has been invited to publish a paper about S2RM® Technology in the World Journal of Stem Cells, and his paper “Stem Cell Therapy Without The Cells” was published in Communicative & Integrative Biology. I spoke at the pharmaceutical conference, “Personalized Medicine And Diagnostics” in March 2011 and at another congress in Beijing, China in Sept. 2011, and will speak at the Molecular Diagnostics Congress in May, 2012 about BRS’ systems biology approach to developing therapeutics. As I state on the website for the meeting, systems biology is a relatively new branch of science that is based on inter-disciplinary study of complex interactions in biological systems. Instead of only understanding biology at a reductionist level, i.e. the pieces of the system, the systems biology approach also seeks to understand how the pieces are joined together, and how the conjoined pieces serve to create function. Indeed biology operates as a system and any analysis of biological phenomenon, including human disease, must consider the system as opposed to considering only a portion of the system, i.e.the classic reductionist approach. I also be spoke about “Systems therapeutics” at the MIT India congress in Mumbai last December, 2011.

Traditional reductionists approaches in biology, pharmaceutics, and medicine, consider only a minor piece of the system when understanding a disease, or developing a therapeutic or medical intervention. As such, these reductionists approaches often yield poor efficacy in treating the condition, and often are replete with numerous side effects. In recognition of the power of systems biology, the National Institutes of Health has recently funded two centers for systems biology, one at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, and one at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. Both of these medical schools are ranked in the top ten, and UCSF is perennially ranked in the top three. Both centers will focus on developing systems biology-based therapeutics. Thus, considerable attention is being given to the development of systems biology-based therapeutics in the USA.

Systems biology works on mapping interactions between regulatory molecules in order to understand how complex biological systems work (e.g.Maguire et al, 2006 and Maguire et al, 2007), and often analyzes interactions among all of the genes (genomics) and proteins (proteomics) within a cell in response to potentially harmful changes in the environment. The analysis are then formalized into a model so that disease and therapeutic regimens can be predicted and developed.
At BRS we use stem cell systems biology-based therapeutics to develop the possible means of engineering a patient’s own cells or molecules for therapeutic uses. By developing an understanding of the design rules that govern biological circuits, particularly those involved in perturbations and adaptation, BRS is helping to steer a revolutionary direction in therapeutics and medicine, namely the engineering of “smart cells” or “smart molecules” that can carry out therapeutic tasks.

This engineering-inspired approach at BRS has the potential to transform medicine and therapeutic development. The fundamental understanding of biological circuit structure and function that emerges from studies at BRS will allow definition of core circuit architectures in natural systems in humans, how these circuits are perturbed in disease states, and how the circuit can be engineered to carry out therapeutic development. I’ll be speaking of some of these methodologies at the BIT 4th Annual Congress on Molecular Diagnostics in Beijing, China in Septmeber 2011.

An example of the early success of systems biology includes the Nobel Prize winning work of Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley in England who in 1952 developed the seminal Hodgkin–Huxley model, a mathematical model that describes how action potentials in neurons are initiated and propagated. The model is a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations that approximates the electrical characteristics of excitable cells such as neurons and cardiac myocytes. The model is based on experimental data that were collected by the then revolutionary means of “voltage-clamp” techniques developed by Hodgkin, Huxley, and K.C. Cole at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. This systems biological approach led to an understanding of the basis of nervous system function.

At BRS we use stem cells to develop system-based therapeutics. Stem cells naturally utilize a system of molecules that they release into damaged/diseased tissue. This system of many molecules orchestrates a systems-based healing processes that can be mimicked by using the S2RM TechnologyTM that has been developed at BRS. Thus, instead of the reductionist approach used in classical pharmacologics, BRS uses a natural process where a multitude of molecules from multiple stem cell types are used to induce a natural healing process at many sites, or biological circuits, within the human body.