Systems biology aims to provide a mechanistic understanding of biological systems from high-throughput data. Besides its intrinsic scientific value, this understanding will accelerate product design and development, facilitate health policy decisions and may reduce the need for long-term clinical trials. For this to happen, the knowledge generated by systems biology has to become sufficiently trustworthy for the empirical approach underlying long-term clinical trials to be supplanted by an approach in which mechanism and mechanistic understanding is a driver for decisions. This raises fundamental questions of how to evaluate the veracity of predictions from systems biology models and how to construct mechanistic models that best reflect biological phenomena—questions that are of interest to both academia and industry.
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Reduced Risk Products ("RRPs”) is the term we use to refer to products that present, are likely to present, or have the potential to present less risk of harm to smokers who switch to these products versus continuing smoking. PMI has a range of RRPs in various stages of development, scientific assessment and commercialization. Our RRPs are smoke-free products that produce an aerosol that contains far lower quantities of harmful and potentially harmful constituents than found in cigarette smoke.