Entelos Inc and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a collaboration to better understand how and why communication signals in certain immune system cells break down, a situation that can cause numerous widespread immune and inflammatory diseases such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.

The cross-disciplinary scientific team will include Entelos immunologists and dynamics engineers, and the laboratories of Luk Van Parijs, Ivan R. Cottrell Career Development Assistant Professor in Immunology in MIT's Center for Cancer Research, and Douglas A. Lauffenburger, Uncas & Helen Whitaker Professor of Bioengineering and Co-Director of MIT's Biological Engineering Division. This team will create sophisticated mechanistic models of cells driving key responses within the human inflammatory and immune system. Scientific researchers will create these biological models by combining wet-lab experiments with computational methods derived from Entelos' systems biology approach to in silico biosimulation. This approach creates understanding of human biological functions by taking into account the intricate interactions between proteins, cells, tissues and organs.

The Entelos and MIT collaboration will study the key intracellular communication hubs of T lymphocytes to quantitatively map intracellular pathways that respond to different stimuli and then regulate response by these cells. Entelos will then integrate these cell signaling models within its Immunology PhysioLab Platform, a series of interrelated models of immunology and inflammation. Entelos' Immunology PhysioLab Platform, which includes the Asthma PhysioLab and Rheumatoid Arthritis PhysioLab systems, is currently used to conduct in silico research in drug discovery and development.

Entelos' PhysioLab modeling technology has already modeled organ, tissue and cell-to-cell interaction for numerous major pharmaceutical clients. Entelos modeling technology recently predicted the outcome of two clinical trials.