The Times is running a nice profile piece on Eric Schadt and his work at Rosetta and now Sage Bionetworks.
Biodesic evaluated systems biology investments for a large organization about 18 months ago, and Schadt's approach makes more sense to me -- by far -- than anything else we looked at. I sat in on the pitch that Schadt and Stephen Friend made to that sameorganization, and it was crystal clear to me that Sage -- now residing at the Hutch here in Seattle -- should be on the receiving end of piles of money. The stacks of Nature Group publications Schadt is accumulating suggest he is on to something, and it appears that his methods can be used to make predictions about the behaviors of complex networks. Time and experimentation will tell, of course. The open source aspect is a huge bonus.
Schadt's move to Pacific Biosciences is interesting because during his talk he suggested that genome sequencing provides enough information about variation to fuel his statistical methods for predicting interactions not just between genes but between tissues -- he is working at the level of describing the behavior of networks of networks. It seems he will now have access to plenty of data.