Medical science is always dependant on animals for testing combination of drugs. But expect a change soon. If US-based Indian system scientist Dr VA Shiva Ayyadurai’s recent computational model CytoSolve is adopted, animals won’t get killed.
While it is the world’s first platform for scalable integration of molecular pathway models, it provides an important contribution to the field of systems biology, says Shiva, who is commonly known as the ‘inventor of Email.’
“If Email was the interoffice mail system in an electronic complex system, CytoSolve is the human cell, mitochondria cell and all the reactions inside a human put in a computer system. I spent ten years doing this and what we can now do is model diseases without killing animals,” he adds.
To prove the credibility of this, Shiva took pancreatic cancer as a sample. “We took all reactions that have been written about in research so far, combined them and modelled them. Thus, we made the first mathematical model of pancreatic cancer. Using that, we took all the medicines, generics and started testing. And because we had the cell, we didn’t have to kill animals and we discovered a two combination drug, too, that was allowed by the FDA to go for clinical trials. We did this in 11 months. It normally takes six years to get the FDA’s approval and you have to kill animals. In fact, one of the senior people at the FDA contacted us and said: “What you are doing is where we want to be in the 23rd century.”
Shiva invented this model for his MIT PhD thesis. He elaborates: “In 2003, systems biology came in as a new field because the human genome project had ended. It turned out that we had the same number of genes as a worm. So it was not the number of genes that made a difference but the complexity of molecular reactions in the body. So systems biology questioned whether we could create a model of a human cell — a mathematical and systems model. I was perfect for this because I know how to create large-scale computer systems. So I took the human cell, created its electronic version and called it CytoSolve.”
Shiva’s interest in medical sciences started because of his upbringing in Tamil Nadu with his grandmother and now he wants to use it to revive ancient science. “My grandmother practiced Siddha and I was always curious in the ancient science. Thus, I pursued it. There came a point when I realised that CytoSolve will revolutionise medicine and I wanted to be known as the guy who did that. Today, I’ve become a bridge between the Indian system of medicine and modern biology. I can explain why Ayurveda works. Human body is a system and I’ve created the electronic version of the human body online and we can use that now to prove our ancient system of medicine and create new medicine. I have created the engine to combine pieces of human scientific knowledge to model larger systems,” he explains.
Shiva feels CytoSolve also helps in finding alternative remedies. “We have modelled Brufin to show that it reduces inflammation. Now we said that instead of that what if we take turmeric, mix it with ginger and add some chocolate. Now we were able to show why turmeric and ginger worked in the same manner. They are anti-inflammatory ingredients which the Western world doesn’t recognise. That is why Indians have one-third less liver cancer in Asia,” he adds.
See P4: What is CytoSolve IJ