Systems biology in human health and disease

Mol Syst Biol. 3: 136Understanding the factors that influence human health and cause diseases has always been one of the major driving forces of biological research. With the spectacular progresses in quantitative techniques, large‐scale measurement methods and with the intimate integration between experimental and computational approaches, Biology has recently acquired new technological and conceptual tools to investigate, model and understand living organisms at the system level. While the still young discipline of Systems Biology has been most widely devoted to the study of well‐characterized model organisms, it has been clear since the early days of the human genome project that applications of system‐wide approaches to human biology would open up tremendous opportunities in medicine.Recent lessons learned from Systems Biology, when applied to simple organisms like bacteria or yeast, prefigure the kind of insights that will benefit both basic medical research and clinical applications: deeper understanding of the genotype–phenotype relationship; impact of the interactions between environmental conditions and genotype; novel mechanistic and functional insights based on global unbiased approaches; elaboration of powerful predictive models capturing the intricacies of physiological states. Advances on these various fronts obviously depend on different types of research, ranging from investigations on fundamental aspects of human biology to the more clinically oriented …