Journal of Molecular Cell Biology is delighted to announce the publication of a Special Issue on Bio-network Medicine, which reports the up-to-date progress in systems medicine based on biomolecular networks.
Complex diseases such as cancer or diabetes generally not result from mutations or malfunctions of individual molecules but from dysfunction of relevant networks. Thus, it is of great importance to analyze molecular mechanisms of the diseases on a network basis. Although classical medicine based on molecular biology has made significant progress in general, current methodologies, which are still mainly based on studying individual genes and proteins, are not good enough to solve increasing problems of complex diseases. Therefore, innovative methodologies and techniques from the perspectives of systems biology are strongly demanded to be applied for designing and searching for new medical solutions for preventing, diagnosing, and curing the diseases. Bio-network medicine is such an area to study complex diseases by a network-based approach at the molecular level, and is considered as a powerful method to assist the effective diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of complex diseases.
This special issue of Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, under the theme ‘Bio-network Medicine’, is published to present the latest advances in the field of systems medicine based on biomolecular networks, in particular new approaches developed to decipher the complexity of disease progression, and their implications for therapeutic endeavors. Research papers in this special issue cover topics ranging from disease gene analysis, to biomarker detection, and to disease diagnosis by employing the molecular networks, and can be grouped into sequence data-based studies and expression data-based studies. These studies demonstrate great potentials and power of biomolecular networks on solving the problems of medicine. With further development combining with big data, bio-network medicine is expected to play crucial roles in precision medicine or personalized medicine in the future.
[2015-06-16]
