NIH Support for the Emergence of Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology

In recent years, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has sought to explore the integration between systems biology and pharmacology, believing that systems approaches are needed to understand the complexity of drug action and that studies of drug action will yield new insights into systems biology. To this end, NIGMS sponsored the first quantitative and systems pharmacology (QSP) workshop in October 2008, followed by a second workshop in October 2010 (reported in ref. 1). A working group from the second workshop composed a white paper, “Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology in the Post-Genomic Era: New Approaches to Discovering Drugs and Understanding Therapeutic Mechanisms,” that presented background and recommendations for research and research training for the emerging discipline of QSP.2 The authors present a summary of programmatic offerings that have occurred at NIGMS and NIH in response to these efforts and provide an overview of NIHwide interest in QSP.