Abstract: Systems biology is an approach to the science that views biology as
an information science, studies biological systems as a whole and their
interactions with the environment. This approach, for the reasons described
here, has particular power in the search for informative diagnostic biomarkers
of diseases because it focuses on the fundamental causes and keys on the
identification and understanding of disease- perturbed molecular networks. In
this review, we describe some recent developments that have used systems
biology to address complex diseases – prion disease and drug induced
liver injury- and use these as examples to illustrate the importance of
understanding network structure and dynamics. The knowledge of network dynamics
through in vitro experimental perturbation and modeling allows us to determine
the state of the networks, to identify molecular correlates, and to derive new
disease treatment approaches to reverse the pathology or prevent its progress
into a more severe state through the manipulation of network states. This
general approach, including diagnostics and therapeutics, is becoming known as
systems medicine.
Keywords: Systems biology, biomarkers, systems medicine, prion disease, drug induced liver injury, microRNA, organ-specific proteins
