Systems biomedicine

In many areas of medicine, and in particular for complex, chronic diseases such as diabetes, coronary artery disease or asthma, a single factor is rarely implicated as being solely responsible for disease development or presentation. Rather, multiple genetic and environmental factors are often involved, and the disease evolves through complex interactions between them.

Consequently, a perspective in which the interactions and dynamics of these factors are centrally integrated into the analytical methods is increasingly required in order to develop more effective and efficient treatment strategies.

The clinical practice that results from this paradigm will be distinctly different from the present day, and will be characterised by several distinguishing features, including individualized or stratified treatments, minimized interventions, multidimensional uses of medications, time-sensitive treatments and probabilistic disease and illness forecasting.