Bio-informatics approaches in liver disease: Incomplete without experimental validation

Abstract

In the search for the treatment of hepatic diseases, multiple approaches have been used frequently such as bioinformatics and algorithm-based systems biology for the screening of already published data that leads to the identification of promising drug candidates at molecular levels. These studies provide a large data set of information and claim to identify many genes, which could be targeted for the cure. However, it is important to note that the identified compounds are only predictions and the potential of these suggested molecules or genes should be well confirmed by adopting robust and critical experimental approaches to satisfy all possible aspects to use them safely for therapeutic purposes. Therefore, I put forward the opinion that these predicted markers whether prognostic, diagnostic, or molecular must be evaluated critically through a well-defined experimental pipeline.