Systems biology and the virtual physiological human

Abstract

Mol Syst Biol. 5: 292 The virtual physiological human (VPH) initiative is intended to support the development of patient‐specific computer models and their application in personalised and predictive healthcare. The VPH, a core target of the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme, will serve as a ‘ methodological and technological framework that, once established, will enable collaborative investigation of the human body as a single complex system ’ (http://www.europhysiome.org/roadmap/). As such, the VPH initiative constitutes an integral part of the international Physiome Project (http://www.physiome.org.nz/), a worldwide public domain effort to develop a computational framework for the quantitative description of biological processes in living systems across all relevant levels of structural and functional integration, from molecule to organism, including the human (Kohl et al , 2000; Bassingthwaighte et al , 2009). So, what is the connection between this grand challenge and systems biology? To explore this, we must first agree on what we take systems biology to mean. ### Description versus definition Descriptions of systems biology range from the view that it is merely ‘new wording, more fashionable, for physiology’ (http://is.gd/tQJL), to the all‐inclusive ‘systems biology involves the application of experimental, theoretical, and computational techniques to the study of biological organisms at all levels, from the molecular, through the cellular, to the organ, organism, and populations. Its aim is to understand biological processes as integrated systems instead of as isolated parts’ (http://is.gd/tQK0). At the same time, attempts to concisely define systems biology have not yielded definitive form of words that is acceptable to the majority of researchers engaged in what they consider to be systems biology. One of the reasons for this situation may be that many different scientific streams have come together in the systems biology pool (see also Bassingthwaighte et al , 2009), each with its own conceptual and terminological …