From Systems Biology To Systems Medicine

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the biomedical model dominated healthcare. However, the biomedical model had its critics, who proposed alternative models to replace it. Eventually, biomedicine became fragmented at its foundations with a variety of approaches to its nature and practice. Medicine's current response to this fragmentation is to combine these disparate approaches into a single system--systems medicine. In the present book, I examine the shift, during the postgenomics era, from the biomedical model to systems medicine vis-à-vis systems biology, as well as the challenges facing systems medicine's implementation in the twenty-first century. The main goal of the present book is to provide a disciplinary framework for examining the rise of systems medicine, especially in terms of the incorporation of systems biology into the biomedical model. To realize that goal, the following questions are addressed. What is a disciplinary framework? And, why is this framework important for understanding systems biology and medicine? Briefly, a disciplinary framework represents the relational structure among disparate disciplines that support and ground a discipline and its corpus. For traditional biology and medicine, that framework consists of various disciplines within the biological and biomedical sciences, including physiology, neuroscience, pathology, and epidemiology--to name a few. For the present purpose, systems biology within the last several decades is reshaping the disciplinary framework of the biological and biomedical sciences, which is also responsible for the emergence of systems medicine. In addition, the challenges facing systems medicine, especially its operationalization and implementation with respect to medical education and practice, as well as research, are also explored.

A brilliant young scientist introduces us to the fascinating field that is changing our understanding of how the body works and the way we can approach healing. SYSTEMATIC is the first book to introduce general readers to systems biology, which is improving medical treatments and our understanding of living things. In traditional bottom-up biology, a biologist might spend years studying how a single protein works, but systems biology studies how networks of those proteins work together--how they promote health and how to remedy the situation when the system isn't functioning properly. Breakthroughs in systems biology became possible only when powerful computer technology enabled researchers to process massive amounts of data to study complete systems, and has led to progress in the study of gene regulation and inheritance, cancer drugs personalized to an individual's genetically unique tumor, insights into how the brain works, and the discovery that the bacteria and other microbes that live in the gut may drive malnutrition and obesity. Systems biology is allowing us to understand more complex phenomena than ever before. In accessible prose, SYSTEMATIC sheds light not only on how systems within the body work, but also on how research is yielding new kinds of remedies that enhance and harness the body's own defenses.

This book contributes to better understand how lifestyle modulations can effectively halt the emergence and progression of human diseases. The book will allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms by which the environment interferes with the bio-molecular regulatory processes underlying the emergence and progression of complex diseases, such as cancer. Focusing on key and early cellular bio-molecular events giving rise to the emergence of degenerative chronic disease, it builds on previous experience on the development of multi-cellular organisms, to propose a mathematical and computer based framework that allows the reader to analyze the complex interplay between bio-molecular processes and the (micro)-environment from an integrative, mechanistic, quantitative and dynamical perspective. Taking the wealth of empirical evidence that exists it will show how to build and analyze models of core regulatory networks involved in the emergence and progression of chronic degenerative diseases, using a bottom-up approach.

This volume guides readers through the field of systems medicine by defining the terminology, and describing how established computational methods form bioinformatics and systems biology can be taken forward to an integrative systems medicine approach. Chapters provide an outlook on the role that systems medicine may or should play in various medical fields, and describe different facets of the systems medicine approach in action. Ultimately it introduces tools, resources and methodologies from bioinformatics and systems biology, and how to apply these in a systems medicine project. Written for the Methods in Molecular Biology series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, and discuss experimental and computational approaches, methods, and tools that should be considered for a successful systems medicine project. Systems Medicine aims to motivate and provide guidance for collaborations across disciplines to tackle today's challenges related to human health and well-being.

Technological advances in generated molecular and cell biological data are transforming biomedical research. Sequencing, multi-omics and imaging technologies are likely to have deep impact on the future of medical practice. In parallel to technological developments, methodologies to gather, integrate, visualize and analyze heterogeneous and large-scale data sets are needed to develop new approaches for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. Systems Medicine: Integrative, Qualitative and Computational Approaches is an innovative, interdisciplinary and integrative approach that extends the concept of systems biology and the unprecedented insights that computational methods and mathematical modeling offer of the interactions and network behavior of complex biological systems, to novel clinically relevant applications for the design of more successful prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. This 3 volume work features 132 entries from renowned experts in the fields and covers the tools, methods, algorithms and data analysis workflows used for integrating and analyzing multi-dimensional data routinely generated in clinical settings with the aim of providing medical practitioners with robust clinical decision support systems. Importantly the work delves into the applications of systems medicine in areas such as tumor systems biology, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases as well as immunology and infectious diseases amongst others. This is a fundamental resource for biomedical students and researchers as well as medical practitioners who need to need to adopt advances in computational tools and methods into the clinical practice. Encyclopedic coverage: ‘one-stop’ resource for access to information written by world-leading scholars in the field of Systems Biology and Systems Medicine, with easy cross-referencing of related articles to promote understanding and further research Authoritative: the whole work is authored and edited by recognized experts in the field, with a range of different expertise, ensuring a high quality standard Digitally innovative: Hyperlinked references and further readings, cross-references and diagrams/images will allow readers to easily navigate a wealth of information

This book presents outstanding contributions in an exciting, new and multidisciplinary research area: the application of formal, automated reasoning techniques to analyse complex models in systems biology and systems medicine. Automated reasoning is a field of computer science devoted to the development of algorithms that yield trustworthy answers, providing a basis of sound logical reasoning. For example, in the semiconductor industry formal verification is instrumental to ensuring that chip designs are free of defects (or “bugs”). Over the past 15 years, systems biology and systems medicine have been introduced in an attempt to understand the enormous complexity of life from a computational point of view. This has generated a wealth of new knowledge in the form of computational models, whose staggering complexity makes manual analysis methods infeasible. Sound, trusted, and automated means of analysing the models are thus required in order to be able to trust their conclusions. Above all, this is crucial to engineering safe biomedical devices and to reducing our reliance on wet-lab experiments and clinical trials, which will in turn produce lower economic and societal costs. Some examples of the questions addressed here include: Can we automatically adjust medications for patients with multiple chronic conditions? Can we verify that an artificial pancreas system delivers insulin in a way that ensures Type 1 diabetic patients never suffer from hyperglycaemia or hypoglycaemia? And lastly, can we predict what kind of mutations a cancer cell is likely to undergo? This book brings together leading researchers from a number of highly interdisciplinary areas, including: · Parameter inference from time series · Model selection · Network structure identification · Machine learning · Systems medicine · Hypothesis generation from experimental data · Systems biology, systems medicine, and digital pathology · Verification of biomedical devices “This book presents a comprehensive spectrum of model-focused analysis techniques for biological systems ...an essential resource for tracking the developments of a fast moving field that promises to revolutionize biology and medicine by the automated analysis of models and data.”Prof Luca Cardelli FRS, University of Oxford

This volume guides readers through the field of systems medicine by defining the terminology, and describing how established computational methods form bioinformatics and systems biology can be taken forward to an integrative systems medicine approach. Chapters provide an outlook on the role that systems medicine may or should play in various medical fields, and describe different facets of the systems medicine approach in action. Ultimately it introduces tools, resources and methodologies from bioinformatics and systems biology, and how to apply these in a systems medicine project. Written for the Methods in Molecular Biology series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, and discuss experimental and computational approaches, methods, and tools that should be considered for a successful systems medicine project. Systems Medicine aims to motivate and provide guidance for collaborations across disciplines to tackle today's challenges related to human health and well-being.

"This book highlights the use of systems approaches including genomic, cellular, proteomic, metabolomic, bioinformatics, molecular, and biochemical, to address fundamental questions in complex diseases like cancer diabetes but also in ageing"--Provided by publisher.