L8.1 Systems Medicine Approaches to Cancer and the Emergence of Proactive P4 Medicine

Abstract

A systems approach to cancer is beginning to revolutionized our understanding of this disease. The systems approach includes global, experimental approaches as well as the application of powerful new technologies such as next generation sequencing and single-cell analyses. For example, the Cancer Atlas Project has led to a powerful integration of many different types to genomic information on various cancers to provide mechanistic and on occasion therapeutic insights. I will then focus on our efforts at taking a systems approach to cancer looking at a glioblastomas in mice. These studies have given us new “systems insights” into cancer processes that include a better understanding of disease mechanisms, as well as new approaches to diagnostics and therapy. One interesting questions that I will discuss is how important animal models of disease are for dealing with the signal to noise problems inherent in all large data sets and how closely these murine model diseases mimic their human counterparts. Then I will discuss briefly some of the emerging technologies that will transform biology and medicine over the next 10 years - e.g., next generation DNA sequencing and its applications to human genome and RNA sequencing, targeted mass spectrometry, microfluidic protein chips, single-cell analyses and the use of induced pluripotential cells to understand development, disease mechanisms and disease stratification. It appears that systems medicine, together with emerging technologies and the development of powerful new computational and mathematical tools will transform medicine over the next 5-20 years from its currently reactive state to a mode that is predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory (P4 medicine). I will describe the nature of P4 medicine and its societal implications for healthcare. I will also briefly mention our efforts to bring P4 medicine to patients.