Developing a Theoretical Framework for Optofluidic Device Designing for System Identification in Systems Biology: the EGFR Study Case

Identification of dynamics underlying biochemical pathways of interest in oncology is a primary goal in current systems biology. Understanding structures and interactions that govern the evolution of such systems is believed to be a cornerstone in this research. Systems theory and systems identification theory are primary resources for this task since they both provide a self consistent framework for modelling and manipulating models of dynamical systems that are best suited for the problem under investigation. We address herein the issue of obtaining an informative dataset Z N to be used as starting point for identification of EGFR pathway dynamics. In order to match experimental identifiability criteria we propose a theoretical framework for input stimulus design based on dynamical properties of the system under investigation. A feasible optofluidic design has been designed on the basis of the spectral properties of the driving inputs that maximize information content after the theoretical studies.