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James W. Fickett, global director of bioinformatics at AstraZeneca, agrees that it's not clear at this point what systems biology will ultimately become. "In some sense, everything that we do from now on will be systems biology. In some sense, it's a trivial concept, but working out the particulars is not trivial." AstraZeneca's Fickett points out that most of what is known about protein interactions is contained not in databases or mathematical equations but in the text of the scientific literature. "We want to figure out how to get that information out of the literature and into the hands of our scientists when they're trying to make decisions about which direction to take with a drug discovery program," he says. "We're doing quite a bit of work on categorizing scientific articles according to what molecular processes might be discussed in the text." "I think systems biology will affect everything we do," Fickett says. "In the context of drug discovery, it's about the connection between the molecular and the physiological. When people look back at these decades from a later viewpoint, they'll see that this was the time when molecular physiology really took off
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