The Network Medicine Imperative and the Need for an International Network Medicine Consortium

The new discipline of Network Medicine stems from the growing realization that conventional scientific reductionism is inadequate for dissecting complex diseases, increasing efficacy of prevention strategies, or tailoring precise therapies. In addition, Network Medicine acknowledges that health and disease must be viewed in the context of the interplay among multiple molecular and environmental determinants that must be fully considered in precision diagnostics and therapeutics. Network Medicine, therefore, aims to use innovative technology, information, and big data to create an integrated set of principles and discoveries that can fully capture these inherent dependencies, are relevant and translatable to the clinic, and, consequently, are truly innovative in their implementation. The principles and discoveries aim to influence prevention, diagnosis, and treatment beneficially. The focus should be, for example, toward shifting cancer health care management from diagnosis and treatment (extremely expensive) to prevention (the highest cost/benefit ratio); treating patients with chronic noncommunicable diseases (eg, cardiometabolic diseases) more effectively by understanding how the underlying pathogenic processes act, for example, in different age groups; and comprehending the keys for healthy aging across the life course. Drug development may also be enhanced by Network Medicine. Conventional drug development is limited to a relatively small number of targets that are highly expensive to characterize, not clinically precise, and time-consuming to analyze and test. Repositioning of existing drugs can function more economically to minimize costs, time, and risk. Network Medicine offers a useful platform to address all of these challenges.