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Mission and Vision

The RTK Consortium is organized from a Systems Biology perspective to develop the framework necessary to understand RTK signaling networks central to major human pathologies and therapies. The Consortium will

  1. Produce and consolidate new and existing sets of unified experimental data relevant to building a systems-level model of RTK networks
  2. Establish a universal computational framework for the collection, dissemination and analysis of both data sets and models of RTK signaling networks.

The Consortium will foster cooperation between academia and industry to create predictive, systems-level models that can be used to develop therapies for human malignancies including cancer, immune-based disorders, inflammation and diabetes. The Consortium will develop standards to 1) facilitate the comparison and integration of experimental data and modeling results between labs and industry groups worldwide and 2) apply the most appropriate mathematical analyses to well-defined applications.

The vision of the Consortium is to facilitate and coordinate international efforts to understand RTK signaling and its relationship to human pathologies. Experimental data derived from various diseases and tissue settings, as well as high-throughput experiments will be combined into a shared database. The database will be used to build a constantly improving and expanding global model that will be supervised by the Consortium. Understanding mechanisms underlying RTK network function will provide breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of major human diseases, lead to the design of new therapeutic drugs and decrease the attrition rate of new drugs in development.

Because of the complexity of RTK networks, they can only be understood by rigorous and extensive experimental analyses of a limited number of well-defined experimental systems and equally rigorous and extensive mathematical analyses. The required mathematical and experimental expertise for understanding RTK networks cannot be found in any single laboratory or even country. Thus, the Consortium is dedicated to a strategy in which individual research groups can focus on their own area of excellence, and the data and model can be integrated at the community level. This requires a community infrastructure that can support distributed research. The Consortium will provide the standards that will allow multiple labs across the world to work together productively.