Seeking the whole truth

For most of modern biology's history, progress meant dissecting things, identifying the gene, isolating a protein, naming the cell type. This approach yielded remarkable results - a century of Nobel Prizes, lifesaving medicines and the sequencing of the human genome.

But for all that it revealed, reductionist biology struggled to answer a more fundamental question: How does it all work together? How does a handful of genes produce a functioning organ? How does a single cell become a 37 trillion-cell human being? How does a tumor hijack the rules an organ spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting?

Those questions belong to systems biology, and UC Irvine's Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences has just made them the official business of its newest academic department - the first since the school's four founding departments were created in 1965.

"This is a historic moment for our school," said Frank LaFerla, the Dr. Lionel and Fay Ng Dean of the Dunlop School. "Establishing the Department of Systems Biology reflects where the life sciences are headed - toward greater complexity, greater integration and greater impact. We are positioning UC Irvine to lead that future."

What is systems biology?

Systems biology is the scientific study of how biological components - molecules, cells, tissues, organs - interact as networks to produce behavior that none of those parts could produce alone. Where conventional biology asks what something is, systems biology asks what it does and why it does it that way.

The field draws from an unusually wide range of disciplines: mathematics, engineering, physics, computer science, molecular biology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology and medicine. Its tools include computational modeling, genomics and advanced imaging technologies that can track molecular activity inside living cells in real time. The goal isn't only new treatments or technologies but a fundamentally different understanding of what life is and how it operates.

A central insight of the discipline is that most biological systems weren't assembled randomly. They were shaped by hundreds of millions of years of natural selection to perform specific tasks reliably, efficiently and robustly under changing conditions - much like well-designed engineering systems. Systems biologists look for the underlying "design principles" that explain why living systems are built the way they are.

Why it matters - especially for disease

The stakes of systems biology aren't abstract. Cancer is one of its most urgent applications. Traditional cancer research often focuses on identifying which genes are mutated. Systems biology asks a harder question: Why does a tumor grow the way it does, given that it exists inside tissues that evolved elaborate mechanisms to prevent exactly that?

In 2018, UC Irvine established the Center for Cancer Systems Biology - supported by a $10 million grant from the National Cancer Institute - to pursue that question in relation to three cancers: melanoma, chronic myeloid leukemia and colon cancer. In 2025, an additional $10 million grant was awarded, extending the work to include breast cancer as well.

Researchers here have been combining mathematical modeling with single-cell genomics and other experiments to understand how tumors exploit, and escape, the growth-control mechanisms built into healthy tissue. The insights they're deriving could eventually guide treatments targeted not just at cancer's genetic drivers but at the ecological and feedback dynamics that allow tumors to survive and adapt.

Beyond cancer, systems biology holds promise across the full breadth of the life sciences - genomics, neuroscience, immunology, microbiome research, developmental biology, evolution, ecology and bioengineering. If understanding a complex, dynamic biological system matters more than cataloging its individual parts, systems biology has something to say.

For students, the implications are equally broad. The new department will give biological sciences graduates fluency in quantitative and computational approaches; experience working with complex datasets and modeling; and training at the intersection of biology, mathematics, computer science and engineering - skills applicable in academia, medicine, biotechnology and public health. In an era defined by big, high-dimensional data and AI-enabled analysis, these graduates will be in demand.

Why a department - any why now?

UC Irvine has been teaching systems biology for more than two decades. The Center for Complex Biological Systems, established in 2001, drew together biologists, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists and earned recognition from the National Institutes of Health as one of a small number of national centers for systems biology. That infrastructure is now the foundation for something more permanent.

Leading the new department is Arthur Lander, a Distinguished Professor and Donald Bren Professor. He previously chaired the Department of Developmental & Cell Biology and served for many years as director of the Center for Complex Biological Systems - whose work laid the scientific groundwork for the department's creation. His appointment signals both continuity and ambition: The department inherits a world-class research program and a leader who helped forge it.

"Systems biology has always been about asking questions that can't be answered by looking at things one piece at a time," Lander says. "Having our own department means we can build a community of scholars who share that perspective from the ground up - training students, recruiting faculty and creating a culture where that kind of thinking is the norm, not the exception."

A department does things that a center cannot. It hires and tenures faculty. It grants degrees. It trains the next generation of scientists not just to integrate tools from adjacent fields but to think fluently across all of them from the start. Without departmental status, systems biology risked remaining perpetually interdisciplinary but siloed in practice - its faculty scattered across biology, mathematics and engineering buildings, its Ph.D. students uncertain where they belong.

The new department gives the field an institutional home that matches its intellectual ambitions. It signals that UC Irvine considers systems biology not a methodology borrowed by other departments but a discipline in its own right - one whose questions are distinct, whose training is specialized and whose contributions to science are only beginning to be understood.

The Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences opened in 1965 with four departments. Sixty-one years later, it has added a fifth - one that didn't exist as a branch of learning when the others were founded. That may be the clearest sign of how far biology has traveled and how much further it intends to go.