Systems biomedicine

Systems Biomedicine is the application of Systems Biology to the understanding and modulation of developmental and pathological processes in humans, and in animal and cellular models. Whereas Systems Biology aims at modeling exhaustive networks of interactions (with the long-term goal of, for example, creating a comprehensive computational model of the cell), Systems Biomedicine emphasizes the multilevel, hierarchical nature of the models (molecule, organelle, cell, tissue, organ, individual/genotype, environmental factor, population, ecosystem) by discovering and selecting the key factors at each level and integrating them into models that reveal the global, emergent behavior of the biological process under consideration. Such an approach will be favorable when the execution of all the experiments necessary to establish exhaustive models is limited by time and expense (e.g., in animal models) or basic ethics (e.g., human experimentation). In the year of 1992, a paper on system biomedicine by Kamada T. was published (Nov.-Dec.), and an article on systems medicine and pharmay by Zeng B.J. was also published (April) in the same time period.

In 2009 one of the first research centers specialized on systems biomedicine was founded by Rudi Balling. The Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine is an interdisciplinary center of the University of Luxembourg.

Landes Bioscience will launch the peer-reviewed journal, Systems Biomedicine, in January 2012 http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/systemsbiomedicine/