About this Research Topic

Background

Inflammation is a biological response of organisms to environmental stresses, such as physical damage, infection, and other immune challenges. Although inflammation directs healing of the damaged tissue or avoiding infection, it is also the central pathology of complex chronic conditions such as autoimmune diseases, arthritis, chronic lung disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and psoriasis. Moreover, inflammation has been linked to atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, several types of cancer, metabolic syndromes, and infections.

Therapeutic approaches based on preventing the inflammatory response have proven to be of great clinical benefit for many of these chronic ailments. Infectious diseases and inflammatory disorders are major contributors to the global burden of disease, thereby having broad societal and economic impacts. Unfortunately, modulation of inflammation has met with disappointing results for illnesses severe in many cases. More recently, hyperinflammatory response induced by SARS-CoV-2 is a major cause of disease severity and death in infected patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The last decades have featured the development and fast diffusion of high-throughput technologies, and the volume of omics data generated by these technologies has expanded exponentially. To apply this data, systems biology approaches translate omics data into meaningful networks, thus holding great promise in facilitating our understanding of biological processes in many diseases, from cancers to metabolic disorders. By taking data accumulation into consideration alongside a systems biology outlook, we believe that the role of systems outlook will gradually increase through improving existing approaches and developing novel concepts to reveal the mechanism behind inflammation as well.

Therefore, we aim to assemble a collection of manuscripts that address the systems-level analysis of inflammation associated with different medical conditions and potential treatment strategies. We welcome contributions in the form of Original Research, Brief Research Report, Systematic Review, Review, Mini Review, Methods, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, Case Report, Data Report, Opinion.

Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Network approaches for analyzing and interpreting large-scale biological datasets;
• Analysis of large-scale biological networks for inflammatory diseases;
• Data integration into the biological networks;
• Heterogeneity in inflammation;
• Role of transcriptional and epigenetic factors in inflammation;
• Integration of biological networks;
• Mathematical modeling of gene networks enabling inflammation in diseases;
• Drug repositioning for inflammatory diseases;
• OMICs studies of inflammation using genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, etc.;
• Applications of molecular technics to reveal inflammation patterns in diseases;
• Systems-level analysis of anti-inflammatory drugs.

Conflict of Interest Statement:
Prof. Adil Mardinoglu is a shareholder at ScandiBio Therapeutics, ScandiEdge Therapeutics, and SmartBiome Inc. All other topic editors declare no competing interests.

Keywords: inflammation, systems biology, systems inflammation, inflammatory diseases, anti-inflammatory drugs, drug repositioning

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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