title: Taking Bioinformatics to Systems Medicine.
abstract: Systems medicine promotes a range of approaches and strategies to study human health and disease at a systems level with the aim of improving the overall well-being of (healthy) individuals, and preventing, diagnosing, or curing disease. In this chapter we discuss how bioinformatics critically contributes to systems medicine. First, we explain the role of bioinformatics in the management and analysis of data. In particular we show the importance of publicly available biological and clinical repositories to support systems medicine studies. Second, we discuss how the integration and analysis of multiple types of omics data through integrative bioinformatics may facilitate the determination of more predictive and robust disease signatures, lead to a better understanding of (patho)physiological molecular mechanisms, and facilitate personalized medicine. Third, we focus on network analysis and discuss how gene networks can be constructed from omics data and how these networks can be decomposed into smaller modules. We discuss how the resulting modules can be used to generate experimentally testable hypotheses, provide insight into disease mechanisms, and lead to predictive models. Throughout, we provide several examples demonstrating how bioinformatics contributes to systems medicine and discuss future challenges in bioinformatics that need to be addressed to enable the advancement of systems medicine.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Academic Medical Center (AMC), University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. a.h.vankampen@amc.uva.nl.|Biosystems Data Analysis, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. a.h.vankampen@amc.uva.nl.
authors.forename: Antoine H C
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: van Kampen
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Academic Medical Center (AMC), University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.|Biosystems Data Analysis, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Perry D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Moerland
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000379:methods; D001709:Biotechnology; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D003628:Database Management Systems; D063025:Health Information Management; D006801:Humans; D008511:Medicine / Q000379:methods; D008954:Models, Biological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods
keywords: Bioinformatics; Biological networks; Information management; Integrative bioinformatics; Multi-omics; Systems medicine; Top-down systems biology