The Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology is located at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ottawa. The aim of the institute is to develop and apply systems biology to biological studies relevant to human diseases.

Systems biology represents a paradigm shift in biology from an in depth study of biological parts to an elevation to a systems level. Systems biology attempts to understand how a process, a cell, a group of cells, or an organism works at a global level and how the different components of a process work together. The premise is that the study of the individual elements must be brought to the level of systems in order to truly understand the biology.

Our systems biology approach will be based on the integration of technologies, biology and computation for the study of human diseases. The technology will provide the high-throughput approaches to interrogate biomolecules in various environments. The biology will provide the context (the system) in which to apply these technologies. Finally, the computation will provide the mathematical and spatial modeling at the molecular level resolution. This integration of science will lead to mechanistic understanding of biological processes at the molecular and cellular level. Moreover, it will have a tremendous impact in target and drug discovery processes, where often failure of drugs and targets are associated with a poor understanding of the systems in which a target/drug is involved.

The institute will:

i) develop a systems biology program aimed at the understanding of human diseases,

ii) develop robust platform technologies for high-throughput experiments for systems biology studies and for other projects,

iii) develop innovative high-throughput technologies to probe increasing numbers of biomolecules from cells to tissues and develop novel bioinformatics tools and mathematical modeling approaches for systems biology