ABSTRACT
Medical progress has been slow despite decades of biomedical research and billions of funding. Whether the disease involves cancer, metabolism, inflammation, or neurodegeneration, it has become apparent that we have a limited knowledge of disease processes over time. As a result, no cure is possible with short-term medication. Cancer and cardiovascular diseases continue to kill millions of people each year at younger age.
A desired revolution could be emerged if we are moving from reductionist research that characterizes the individual components of a system of interest to complex biomolecules interactions and human-environment interplay. Although it is hard and less comfort for our scientific thinking to understanding dynamic nonlinear genotype phenotype associations, this challenging way represents the major hope for the future.
Here, I discuss the limitations of conventional medicine, and the advances of next-generation sequencing technology in understanding structure and function of model organisms and human genome. Understanding genome biology in health and disease and how functional regulatory networks are perturbed by inherited and somatic mutations in diseases we establish the basis of network biology-based translational medicine.
(Citation: Gastric & Breast Cancer 2011; 10(3): 131-138)
This article
is 8 pages long, and includes 2 figures.
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