A new frontier of medicine is before us. Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of medical research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. With contributions from leading experts this volume provides readers with a state-of-the-art synthesis of the progress being made and the challenges that remain. Medical researchers have long sought to identify single molecular defects that cause diseases, with the goal of developing silver-bullet therapies to treat them. But this paradigm overlooks the inherent complexity of human diseases and has often led to treatments that are inadequate or fraught with adverse side effects. Rather than trying to force disease pathogenesis into a reductionist model, network medicine embraces the complexity of multiple influences on disease and relies on many different types of networks. Since most of cell components are interconnected through complex metabolic and protein-protein interactions, network-based analysis is destined to play a key role. Due to these interactions, genetic defects can affect the activity of other genes with no defects, though a molecular network. This is evidenced by the fact that a disease is hardly ever the result of the defect of a single gene but is rather the consequence of a perturbation of this network.
Loscalzo, Barabási and Silverman provide us with a systematic approach to understand complex diseases by explaining the unique features of network medicine and the new revolutionary perspectives that it is outlining.
Joseph Loscalzo is Chairman of the Department of Medicine, and Physician-in-Chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Albert-László Barabási is professor of Network Theory, Director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research and founder of the Network Medicine Division at Harvard Medical School.
Edwin K. Silverman is chief of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
A new frontier of medicine is before us. Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of medical research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. With contributions from leading experts this volume provides readers with a state-of-the-art synthesis of the progress being made and the challenges that remain. Medical researchers have long sought to identify single molecular defects that cause diseases, with the goal of developing silver-bullet therapies to treat them. But this paradigm overlooks the inherent complexity of human diseases and has often led to treatments that are inadequate or fraught with adverse side effects. Rather than trying to force disease pathogenesis into a reductionist model, network medicine embraces the complexity of multiple influences on disease and relies on many different types of networks. Since most of cell components are interconnected through complex metabolic and protein-protein interactions, network-based analysis is destined to play a key role. Due to these interactions, genetic defects can affect the activity of other genes with no defects, though a molecular network. This is evidenced by the fact that a disease is hardly ever the result of the defect of a single gene but is rather the consequence of a perturbation of this network.
Loscalzo, Barabási and Silverman provide us with a systematic approach to understand complex diseases by explaining the unique features of network medicine and the new revolutionary perspectives that it is outlining.
Joseph Loscalzo is Chairman of the Department of Medicine, and Physician-in-Chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Albert-László Barabási is professor of Network Theory, Director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research and founder of the Network Medicine Division at Harvard Medical School.
Edwin K. Silverman is chief of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
