Systems biology recalls to us some aspects of traditional medicine
Creators: name: Mohieddin Jafari
name: Karimi, Mehrdad
Publisher: name: F1000 Research Limited
Year: 2018

description: Systems biology, as a paradigm, changes our insight of biological study, in the full sense of the term [1, 2]. In other words, nothing in biology and also biomedicine makes truly sense except in the light of systems biology which provides a birds-eye view map containing molecular to physiological information levels [3]. In this lecture, I took a glance at what recalls to us traditional medicine i.e. Iranian traditional medicine (ITM) when we are faced with the modify-measure-mine-model-verify paradigm of systems biology. I summarized the lecture into four common keywords between ITM and systems biology; “holistic approach”, “emergent properties”, “classification” and “personalized medicine”. <br><br>First, I pointed to a well-known and frequent keyword in both contexts i.e. “holistic approach”. Network biology as a flag of systems biology loudly announces that reductionism as a paradigm is expired [4] and consistently the holistic medicine is a bold tag on all branches of alternative and complementary medicine. For instance, in ITM, it is not surprising to relate insomnia to intestinal ischemia and provide a therapeutic prescription for the intestine to cure sleep disorders [5, 6].<br>Note that this approach is stemmed from another significant keyword that is “emergent properties” which is indicated frequently in traditional school of medicine and the state-of-the-art systems biology models. Both are based on the understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and many given properties emerge when the whole is considered. In other words, using a whole part of a materia medica for treatment against active ingredient extraction is the main distinction between ITM and phytochemical medications [5].<br><br>The third keyword is the “classification” which has routinely been performed in case of facing to any phenomena from physiological or pathological syndrome to morphological explanation of a herbal drug. These classes which are usually called Mizaj or temperament are introduced qualitatively or semi-quantitatively in ITM according to available technology and data gathering methods. Nowadays, thanks to the development of advanced machine learning methods, classification is a powerful support in the modelling of biological high-throughput big data to categorize the subclasses among samples or conditions.<br><br>Finally, I highlighted the outstanding outcome of systems biology in the medicine or systems medicine, which is a “personalized medicine”, one of the four P4 medicine pillars [7, 8]. Using individual genomic data or individualized pharmacotherapy with cell culture assays for offering personalized medication are the exemplary efforts of this new trend in the field of systems medicine [9, 10]. ITM also applies the classification to propose specialized medication to patients. In this personalization, the mizaj of the patient before and after the disease, the disease types, the strength and weakness of the patient, age, patient’s habits, cure times, geographical locations and the weather are considered to treat a patient’s disease [6].<br><br>Now, we believe that it is time to redefine our inherited knowledge of traditional school by the new approach of systems biology or bridge the gap between them to move more quickly toward making life better for patients. In this regard, recently, we showed the distinctive proteomic profile of healthy individuals with different mizaj [11, 12]. 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