Bridging the gap between systems biology and medicine

Recent years have seen the rise of systems biology as a legitimate discipline. Although consensus exists about what the fundamental tools are (high-throughput data from several biologic scales, high-definition imaging, and computational modeling), no such consensus exists as to what defines the broad agenda of systems biology. A growing awareness is found that, despite such major technologic advances, fundamental obstacles separate systems biology from clinical applications. Bridging these gaps will require a focused and concerted effort. What defines systems medicine as a discipline? What should it seek to accomplish? How should knowledge from disparate sources be assembled into ontologies relevant to systems medicine? How are multiscale data to be synthesized by corresponding multiscale models? What is the burden of proof that such models are valid and predictive of clinically relevant outcomes? Is network analysis a useful tool for systems medicine?Physicians, basic scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists met at the Third Bertinoro Systems Biology workshop [1], sponsored by the University of Bologna, focused on the theme 'Systems Biology Meets the Clinic' to address these questions. Participants sought to identify key challenges facing the successful translation of systems biology to the clinical arena and discussed and debated a roadmap seeking to address them. The meeting, held over a 4-day period, comprised plenary lectures followed by extensive thematic discussions, formal and informal, centered on the theme of systems medicine as a distinct translational discipline [2].Workshop participants proposed that systems medicine be defined as the application of systems biology to the prevention of, understanding and modulation of, and recovery from developmental disorders and pathologic processes in human health. Although no clear boundary exists between systems biology and systems medicine, it could be stated that systems biology is aimed