Can CAD cure cancer?

Eukaryotic cells have complex regulatory systems that sense adversity (e.g. DNA damage, heat shock, external death-induction signals) and respond by invoking programmed cell-death or apoptosis. Cancer cells have evolved the ability to thwart such sensory information and associated regulation. As biologists begin to understand cells in circuit-like terms, we can also begin to derive and simulate druggable targets of cellular networks that cause a cancerous cell to kill its self. Towards this goal, we have performed preliminary experiments that test the impact of siRNA (RNA silencing) on diverse cellular signaling pathways, at unprecedented single-cell resolution. We propose ways in which a CAD system can process such data to automatically derive drug targets.