Modeling gene regulatory networks: A survey

One of the major missions of the health care enterprise in Egypt is the proper control of local endemic diseases, such as liver and breast cancers, through the development and maintenance of integrated quality programs in patient care, research, education, and prevention. This was particularly manifested by the establishment of the National Cancer Institute NCI in the 1950´s [1]. NCI is the largest comprehensive cancer center in Egypt, and is committed to the multidisciplinary approach to cancer management in which different treatment modalities cooperate rather than compete. Given a particular kind of disease one of the major problems to its management and treatment can be summarized by the following: (1) to isolate the genes that are involved in that cancer, (2) to model the interactions among these genes to derive what is called Gene Regulatory Network GRN, and (3) to detect the topological changes among the GRN of the normal state, the GRN of the cancer state, and the GRN that results as a pharmacologic response to a therapeutic intervention; these changes are called biomarkers. Modeling of GRNs is a multidisciplinary task that poses many scientific challenges. The subject has gained much interest in the past few years. In this article we give a quick survey of the current modeling techniques of gene regulatory networks.