Table 1 How systems medicine is transforming healthcare

Provides fundamental insights into dynamic disease-perturbed networks in model organisms

Enables mechanistic insights, diagnosis, therapy and prevention for the individual patient

Pioneers family genome sequencing, identifying disease genes inexpensively and effectively

Identifies disease, wellness and drug-intolerant gene products. Identifies individuals who have any one or more of 300 actionable gene variants

Transforms blood into a window to distinguish health from disease

Disease diagnostics, assesses drug toxicity and wellness; examples include lung cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), liver toxicity and hepatitis

Stratifies diseases into their distinct subtypes

For selecting specific and effective drugs for each subtype

Stratifies patients - drug adverse reactions, modifier genes to disease mechanisms, for example early and late onset of Huntington’s disease, variant genes that increase mercury susceptibility in children

Stratifies patients for appropriate treatments

Permits a multi-organ approach to the study of disease

Unravels the complexity of the individual patient’s disease and how a single disease affects multiple organs

Enables new computational approaches to pioneering drug reuse and drug target discovery

Re-engineers disease-perturbed networks to normalcy with drugs and repurpose drugs. Faster and cheaper to develop drugs that prevent networks from becoming disease-perturbed

Focuses on wellness

Wellness is a driver for P4 medicine of the future

Creates large-scale, multiparameter, Framingham-like clinical trials to permit the longitudinal analyses of disease or wellness states

These studies will provide insights into early disease mechanisms and will provide new approaches to diagnosis and therapy