Biology has seen a rapid development in recent years, and systems approaches are now widely recognised by biologists as necessary for understanding complex, dynamical phenomena. Since over 60 years, control and systems research has seen biology as an application area. Nevertheless, there still remain many open theoretical challenges. This is due to the peculiarities of biological systems and the wide and diverse range of possible experiments and data types. In this presentation, we give an overview of current trends in the modelling of cellular biological systems and the theoretical research they stimulated. As an example, the process of "programmed cell death" will be studied from a feedback control perspective. We conclude with surveying open problems in systems theory for systems biology.
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