The Center for Inflammation and Regenerative Modeling
was established to address the need for a unified, systems framework
to tackle the complexity of the inflammatory response — in
the setting of regenerative medicine and beyond.
CIRM is headed by Yoram Vodovotz, PhD, director (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Surgery) and Gilles Clermont, MD, MSc, medical director (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Critical Care Medicine). View CIRM Organizational Chart
Integral parts of CIRM include its
three cores: Modeling, Educational, and Data Analysis. This framework
is designed to train interdisciplinary scientists in the emerging
discipline of inflammation modeling, to characterize several
scenarios of relevance to regenerative medicine, and to identify
new therapeutic approaches.
A New Paradigm
By employing high-throughput technologies, “systems biology” has
emerged as a new paradigm that allows the study of large portions
of physiological networks simultaneously, using genomic, proteomic,
and metabolomic biomarker profiling to understand the behavior
of the system as a whole. These
approaches must be coupled with mathematical modeling of complex systems in
order to tame the seemingly unpredictable behavior of such biological phenomena
and to account for the plethora of known and unknown interactions among biologic
pathways. Only then can we control and possibly harness the inflammatory process
for the purpose of regenerative medicine.
Useful Links:
Society for Complexity in Acute Illness (www.scai-med.org)
International Conference on Complexity in Acute Illness (www.iccai.org)