From biological and clinical experiments to mathematical models

The theory of dynamical systems and of nonlinear partial differential evolution equations and their applications in biology, physiology and medicine are fostered with the following papers comprising the present issue. They form a focused issue, which has its roots in an international congress on the same topic held by the Société Francophone de Biologie Théorique (SFBT) from 8 to 11 June 2008 in Saint-Flour dedicated to the memory of Gilbert Chauvet. It was partly sponsored by the Agence National de la Recherche via the ANAR and the SAPHIR projects. The SFBT was created in the early 1980s under the impetus of Pierre Delattre, Michel Thellier and René Thom with the objective to promote the development of methods and theoretical formalisms useful for fundamental biological research as well as for practical applications. The strength and originality of the SFBT are to bring together scientists from various fields and with heterogeneous backgrounds to debate hot topics in theoretical biology. These cross-disciplinary connections often raise interesting and fruitful discussions and sometimes give rise to new collaborations. For most of the participants, the SFBT meeting, which takes place once a year in Saint-Flour (France) and once every 3 years in a French-speaking country (e.g. Canada and Morocco), is the place where they can exchange new ideas and discover new theoretical work in mathematical biology. Another important vocation for the SFBT is to provide young researchers an overview of the latest research in their area and to give them a different reading of their research topics through meetings with scientists whose training is often quite different from their usual working environment. In the past, various meetings were regularly organized, essentially at the Solignac Abbey, the Saint-Flour Grand Séminaire and the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques (CIRM) at Luminy, and then published by various publishing houses (see Delattre et al. 1979; Legay et al. 1980; Della Dora et al. 1981; Le Guyader et al. 1981; Chauvet et al. 1982; Cosnard et al. 1983; Gallis 1984; Benchetrit & Demongeot 1985; Demongeot et al. 1985). Recent years have seen the emergence of an integrated approach called systems biology (Auffray et al. 2003). In parallel, model-driven medical and biological data acquisition (see Demongeot 2002) has been sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences and by the programme ‘Technologies pour la Santé’ (Technologies for Health) of the French ministry of research and technology. At the European level, the EC’s Seventh Framework Programme