Systems medicine and integrated care to combat chronic noncommunicable diseases.

We propose an innovative, integrated, cost-effective health system to combat major non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular, chronic respiratory, metabolic, rheumatologic and neurologic disorders and cancers, which together are the predominant health problem of the 21st century. This proposed holistic strategy involves comprehensive patient-centered integrated care and multi-scale, multi-modal and multi-level systems approaches to tackle NCDs as a common group of diseases. Rather than studying each disease individually, it will take into account their intertwined gene-environment, socio-economic interactions and co-morbidities that lead to individual-specific complex phenotypes. It will implement a road map for predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory (P4) medicine based on a robust and extensive knowledge management infrastructure that contains individual patient information. It will be supported by strategic partnerships involving all stakeholders, including general practitioners associated with patient-centered care. This systems medicine strategy, which will take a holistic approach to disease, is designed to allow the results to be used globally, taking into account the needs and specificities of local economies and health systems.

Systems biology at the Institute for Systems Biology.

Systems biology represents an experimental approach to biology that attempts to study biological systems in a holistic rather than an atomistic manner. Ideally this involves gathering dynamic and global data sets as well as phenotypic data from different levels of the biological information hierarchy, integrating them and modeling them graphically and/or mathematically to generate mechanistic explanations for the emergent systems properties. This requires that the biological frontiers drive the development of new measurement and visualization technologies and the pioneering of new computational and mathematical tools-all of which requires a cross-disciplinary environment composed of biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and physicians speaking common discipline languages. The Institute for Systems Biology has aspired to pioneer and seamlessly integrate each of these concepts.