Personal Dense Dynamic Data Clouds Connect Systems Biomedicine to Scientific Wellness.

The dramatic convergence of molecular biology, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence has provided a substrate for deep understanding of the biological basis of health and disease. Systems biology is a holistic, dynamic, integrative, cross-disciplinary approach to biological complexity that embraces experimentation, technology, computation, and clinical translation. Systems Medicine integrates genome analyses and longitudinal deep phenotyping with biological pathways and networks to understand mechanisms of disease, identify relevant blood biomarkers, define druggable molecular targets, and enhance the maintenance or restoration of wellness. Two programs initiated our understanding of data-driven population-based wellness. The Pioneer 100 Study of Scientific Wellness and the much larger Arivale commercial program that followed had two spectacular results: demonstrating the feasibility and utility of collecting longitudinal multiomic data, and then generating dense, dynamic data clouds for each individual to utilize actionable metrics for promoting health and preventing disease when combined with personalized coaching. Future developments in these domains will enable better population health and personal, preventive, predictive, participatory (P4) health care.

Taking Systems Medicine to Heart.

Systems medicine is a holistic approach to deciphering the complexity of human physiology in health and disease. In essence, a living body is constituted of networks of dynamically interacting units (molecules, cells, organs, etc) that underlie its collective functions. Declining resilience because of aging and other chronic environmental exposures drives the system to transition from a health state to a disease state; these transitions, triggered by acute perturbations or chronic disturbance, manifest as qualitative shifts in the interactions and dynamics of the disease-perturbed networks. Understanding health-to-disease transitions poses a high-dimensional nonlinear reconstruction problem that requires deep understanding of biology and innovation in study design, technology, and data analysis. With a focus on the principles of systems medicine, this Review discusses approaches for deciphering this biological complexity from a novel perspective, namely, understanding how disease-perturbed networks function; their study provides insights into fundamental disease mechanisms. The immediate goals for systems medicine are to identify early transitions to cardiovascular (and other chronic) diseases and to accelerate the translation of new preventive, diagnostic, or therapeutic targets into clinical practice, a critical step in the development of personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory (P4) medicine.