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BIRGIT SCHOEBERL: Hello.
My name is Birgit Schoeberl,
and I work for
Merrimack Pharmaceuticals.
We are based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
The company is a biotech company
based on systems biology.
We are about 14 years old.
And I'm happy to be here today
to talk to you about the story
of our anti-ErbB3
antibody MM-121
and use that as an example of
how systems biology
can be used in drug development.
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So where has the state of
oncology drug development been?
In general, the focus
has been on correlating
how individual genes
drive tumor growth,
also called oncogenic drivers.
And the single
one-to-one correlation
resulted in a series
of very interesting
targeted therapies,
like Crizotinib
to treat ALK mutations,
Herceptin to treat tumors
with Her2 amplifications.
And they're, in general,
very effective,
but the problem
with these types of therapies
that are targeted
at single mutations
driving tumor growth,
are that there's
only very few patients
that have tumors
that are dependent
on these mutations.
So the prevalence ranges,
in general, 10% to 15%.
So why do we need to understand
the networks and systems?
Why do we need systems biology?
Often there are no simple
one-to-one correlations,
and the tumors are dependent
on multiple pathways,
or the dependents
are much more complex.
And now, we are
in the fortunate situation
that most of the components
of human cells are known,
thanks to the Human
Genome Project.
So now it's really up to us
to understand
how these components
play together in healthy
as well as disease states.
So we get to this
holistic understanding
of what is driving tumor growth,
that will allow us to identify
critical drivers
of tumor growth,
that are not
necessarily mutated,
but most likely, more abundant.
And what I'd like to do today
is show you an example
of how we did that
and identified ErbB3
as a target,
and discovered 121
and anti-ErbB3 antibody,
as well as predictive response
biomarkers that were, later on,
implemented in our
clinical trials.
So in the next slide,
I will show you
a schematic of how
we use network biology,
or systems biology, in practice.
