History of Network Medicine

1991
CERN introduces the World Wide Web to the public.

1999
Barabasi introduced the concept of scale-free networks and proposed the Barabási–Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems. Barabasi’s paper on Scale-Free Networks in Science Magazine becomes the most-cited paper in the Physical Sciences. 

2000
Barabasi, Réka Albert, and Hawoong Jeong publish Error and attack tolerance of complex networks in Nature which not only made the journal’s cover, it also had a profound impact on our understanding of network robustness. 

2001
In Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks, which became the most cited in the Reviews of Modern Physics, Barabasi, Réka Albert, and Hawoong Jeong demonstrated the Achilles' heel property of scale-free networks, showing that such networks are robust to random failures but fragile to attacks. 

2003
The Human Genome Project was declared complete in April 2003. The project determined there are approximately 22,300 protein-coding genes in human beings. Loscalzo and Barabasi begin building the map of human disease biology that explains how proteins expressed from the human genome interact to cause specific diseases.

2005
Barabasi was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology. The National Research Council report published by the US National Academies coined the term Network Science and persuaded the US government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to support this new research field as a new and separate discipline. Eventually the most venerable scientific publishers, like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Stringer, and the top engineering society, IEEE, launched journals to cover the field’s advances.

2006
Barabási is the 2006 recipient of the John von Neumann Medal, which is presented by the Hungarian-based John von Neumann Computer Society for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. The award has been presented since 1976 to a maximum of three individuals who have gained distinction in the dissemination of computer culture. Previous recipients of the award include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former IBM chairman Louis Gerstner and Intel Corporation board chair Andrew Grove.

2007
Loscalzo, Kohane, and Barabási publish Human disease classification in the postgenomic era in the Molecular Systems Biology journal which establishes Network Medicine as a complex systems approach to human pathobiology.

2011
Barabási, Gulbahce, and Loscalzo publish Network Medicine: A Network-based Approach to Human Disease in Nature where they present an overview of the organizing principles that govern cellular networks and the implications of these principles for understanding disease.

2012
The Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital was created in 2012 to study, reclassify, and develop treatments for complex diseases using network science and systems biology. It focuses on three areas: (1) Chronic Disease Epidemiology uses genomics and metabolomics in large, long-term epidemiology studies, such as the Nurses' Health Study. (2) Systems Genetics & Genomics focuses on complex respiratory diseases, specifically COPD and asthma, in smaller population studies. (3) Systems Pathology uses multidisciplinary approaches, including as control theory, dynamical systems, and combinatorial optimization, to understand complex diseases and guide biomarker design.

2016
Barabasi publishes Network Science, a pioneering textbook which introduces network science to an interdisciplinary audience.

Joseph Loscalzo and Enrico Petrillo form the Network Medicine Alliance representing 31 leading universities and institutions around the world.

2017
Joseph Loscalzo, Albert-László Barabási, and Edwin Silverman publish the seminal Network Medicine textbook.

2018
Joseph Loscalzo and Albert-László Barabási publish Network-based approach to prediction and population-based validation of in silico drug repurposing which demonstrated that a unique integration of protein-protein interaction network proximity and large-scale patient-level longitudinal data complemented by mechanistic in vitro studies can facilitate drug repurposing.

The Transformation of Medicine, The First International Conference on Network Medicine and Big Data was held in Rome, Italy. The ultimate goal of the meeting was to design a strategy by which this interdisciplinary field can truly transform medicine.

2019
The Channing Division of Network Medicine (CDNM) continues to expand its staff of more than 80 Harvard Medical School faculty and 42 fellows in addition to 160 non-faculty Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) employees. BWH oversees the second largest hospital-based research program in the world. CDNM’s annual research expenditures represented 25% of the BWH Department of Medicine annual budget. In fiscal year 2019, CDNM investigators received 54 new funding awards resulting in 173 active grants.