Plenary Talk: Predicting Cellular Responses and Fate Decisions - Knowledge-Based Vs Data-Driven Models

Predicting cell fate decisions is a key goal in systems biology and fundamental to clinical decision-making. Whereas the former typically involves kinetic models based on knowledge of molecular mechanism, the latter is typically based on measurements of “predictive biomarkers” and machine learning models. Examining the cellular decision to undergo apoptosis or the capacity to discriminate diverse immune stimuli, we have related the two approaches to each other and thus gained some tantalizing insights about the determinants of the predictive power of clinical biomarkers, or the ‘language’ of immune sentinel cells.