Why should we use systems approaches in cancer research? An educational video project
As the Education Scholar for UVA’s SASCO Center, a U54 Center funded by the NIH, I was tasked with creating a video introducing clinicans to systems biology. In the end, I made a video focusing on three main things:
- WHAT is systems biology? Systems biology is difficult to define, so I explore the history of the term and interview UVA scientists to determine a cohesive definition of the field.
- WHY do we need systems approaches in cancer? Because cancer is a complex system, reductionist approaches are not enough to figure out why things go wrong, such as adaptive resistance.
- HOW do systems approaches get used in the clinic today? While systems biology is a relatively new field, some successes have already made their way through clinical trials and are influencing treatment today, such as adaptive therapy approaches.
TO make this video accessible to a wide audience, I incorporated several examples, such as treatment options, and analogies, such as weather modeling.
The full video is linked below:
If you are interested in using snippets of this video for educational purposes, I have also made alternative, shorter videos that can be used in a classroom or other educational setting. The video below contains most of the same information as above without the long explaination of what complexity is. This video would be useful for an audience of clinicians, as it more directly focuses on the applicability of systems biology ideas to the clinic.
Finally, I pulled out the section on complexity as its own video. This can be paired with the shorter video above (notice the link within the previous video for those curious for more information). This video focuses on the weather analogy for complex systems. This video would be useful for a classroom setting, when a shorter video would be helpful. It explains the why behind systems biology: many systems are too complex to understand without specialized systems approaches.
I greatly enjoyed making this resource for the systems biology community. Please acknowledge credit to Sarah Groves if you reproduce this video. If possible, share the Youtube links (embedded above) so that we can keep track of usage.