Can CAD cure cancer?

Eukaryotic cells have complex regulatory systems that sense adversity (e.g. DNA damage, heat shock, external deathinduction signals) and respond by invoking programmed celldeath 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.