1. Introduction to Cancer
Systems Biology
Hsueh-Fen Juan∗,‡and Hsuan-Cheng Huang†
∗Department of Life Science, Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology,
and Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics,
National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan
†Institute of Biomedical Informatics, Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology,
National Yang-Ming University, Taipei 112, Taiwan
‡[email protected]- Cancer systems biology
Cancer is a life-threatening disease and it is one of the leading causes of death
worldwide.^1 Our knowledge of cancer is advancing at an astonishing rate;
however, the more we understand, the more complexities cancer reveals.^2
Various processes, at both the molecular and cellular levels, function in
a dynamic and connective manner which must be understood to address
the disease.^2 Probing global DNA, RNA, and protein expression can
generate big omics data which in turn creates a systems approach to cancer
biology research, also known as cancer systems biology. Cancer systems
biology addresses the complexity of cancer by integrating experimental and
computational methods in the synthesis and testing of cancer biological
hypotheses.
- Omics big data and bioinformatics
Systems biology is a data-driven science which produces big omics data
for the discovery of disease biomarkers and drugs, as well as the study
of molecular regulation and mechanism (Fig. 1). After the human genome
profile is completed, the post-genome era would be upon us. The biological
omics data include genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabonome. How
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