Future of Medicine: Models in Predictive Diagnostics and Personalized Medicine - Molecular Diagnostics - page 16

Keywords Distributed computing Health care revolution High-throughput
data analysis Nonlinear information and communication technology Person-

alized medicine Predictive model Systems medicine Virtual human

Contents

1 Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 16

2 Molecular Diagnostics as a Driver for Systems Medicine ................................................ 18

3 Systems Medicine: A Paradigm Shift in Personalized Medicine...................................... 22

4 The 'IT Future of Medicine' Approach ............................................................................. 23

5 Modeling Approaches for the Virtual Patient .................................................................... 24

5.1 Anatomical Models..................................................................................................... 24

5.2 Physiological Models.................................................................................................. 25

5.3 Molecular Models ....................................................................................................... 26

6 Information and Communication Technologies Are the Drivers

for Systems Medicine.......................................................................................................... 28

7 Implementation in the Health Care System ....................................................................... 29

References.................................................................................................................................. 31

1 Introduction

The emergence of modern technologies in molecular biology has triggered a
paradigm shift in the life sciences. The major breakthrough in this field has been
the sequencing of the human genome. In a concerted worldwide effort the first
draft of the human genome was published in 2001 [ 1 , 2 ]. The development process
of the sequencing technology and gathering of genomic data lasted over 10 years
at a cost of 3 billion USD. Since then genome research has been in a phase of rapid
development. The modern high-throughput technologies in the 'omics' field for
high-throughput analyses of genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, or other aspects
of biological information are now more powerful and efficient and are used to
unravel the inherent complexity of living systems. These technologies allow an
analytical depth that was not predictable 10 years ago. With this huge spectrum of
analytical tools and the increasing throughput, the amount of data produced from
biological samples increased tremendously with the effect that new ways had to be
implemented to handle, analyse, evaluate, and interpret molecular biology data.
Bioinformatics as a new scientific discipline has been established to facilitate data
handling and support with tools and methods. As the amount, complexity, and
heterogeneity of the data increase it has become a new challenge to integrate the
information and generate an understanding of the whole biological system. Sys-
tems biology as the next wave in molecular biology addresses these issues and
generates computational and mathematical tools to elucidate the functional and
regulatory

networks [ 3 ] of complex biological systems. Today, modeling