Systems and Network-Based Approaches for Personalized Medicine

Abstract

Most biological outcomes in a cell arise from a complex interplay between different cellular entities such as proteins, DNA, RNA and metabolites. Therefore, a key challenge for biology in the twenty-first century is to understand the structure and dynamics of the complex web of interactions in a cell that contribute to its proper functioning. Recent years have seen a surge in the amount of “omics” data and an integration of several disciplines which has influenced all areas of life sciences, from molecular biology to medicine. With the emergence of a number of sophisticated tools and technologies as a result of genomics revolution, we are now in a position to view the molecular aspects of diseases at a systems level by incorporating various cellular entities into a network framework. Such systems/network-based approaches are not only enabling us to develop models of disease and wellness in a population but also contributing to our efforts to reverse engineer the molecular networks corresponding to disease states by perturbing using drug cocktails. These multi-scale personalized medicine approaches are likely to significantly re-shape the health care industry in the coming decades and decrease the division that we currently see between medicine and other biotechnology disciplines.