About this Research Topic

Background

Precision medicine is targeted disease prevention and treatments that takes into account individual genetic variation and environmental influences to provide “the right treatment for the right person at the right time”. This approach is intended to translate into improved healthcare outcomes, reduced adverse drug safety events and greater healthcare quality, but this is often not the case. Evolution of systems and network approaches to precision medicine in healthcare are revolutionizing how patient outcomes are improved. Big data accumulation and computational use across multiple healthcare spectrum domains with AI/ML allows for sophisticated identification of targeted pharmacological and mechanistic treatments to evaluate a number of complex diseases at greater scale.

The one size fits all approach in medicine does not work. Current treatments for complex diseases are chronic symptom-based drug therapies, which are highly ineffective, lead to low patient benefit, increased adverse effects and high numbers needed to treat. Although use of precision medicine aims to target the causal mechanisms of the disease and promote curative amelioration, network and systems science is required to avoid piecemeal assembly of single molecules. Rather than a single gene to single phenotype view, complex disease mechanisms involve dysfunctional signaling networks where multiple components, organs, and systems factors are affected. The ‘one gene-one disease-one target-one drug’ dogma is thus obsolete, obstructs innovation in medicine, and results in inefficient healthcare with suboptimal outcomes. Systems and Network Medicine approaches offer a new view of Precision Medicine to revolutionize the way diseases are approached – from diagnosis to treatment – by understanding and targeting the disease’s causative mechanisms rather than treating an individual’s symptoms. In this issue, we thus bring together interdisciplinary Systems and Network Medicine approaches to highlight how precision medicine advances can be better integrated into healthcare to strengthen clinical translation, increase patient benefits, and reduce serious harms.

Manuscripts are requested for the following Research Topics: Biological networks and their applications to disease treatment; Systems pharmacology, drug repurposing, and / or mechanistic based development; Multi-omics / multilayer networks in medicine; Precision network medicine for personalized diagnostics and therapies; Mobility, social network / social determinants of health, electronic health record, and / or clinical decision support system analytics for human well-being, patient safety, or healthcare quality.

Keywords: Precision medicine, Systems medicine, Network medicine, AI/ML, Healthcare

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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