Systems medicine advances in interstitial lung disease

Abstract

Fibrotic lung diseases involve subject-environment interactions, together with dysregulated homeostatic processes, impaired DNA repair and distorted immune functions. Systems medicine-based approaches are used to analyse diseases in a holistic manner, by integrating systems biology platforms along with clinical parameters, for the purpose of understanding disease origin, progression, exacerbation and remission.Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) refer to a heterogeneous group of complex fibrotic diseases. The increase of systems medicine-based approaches in the understanding of ILDs provides exceptional advantages by improving diagnostics, unravelling phenotypical differences, and stratifying patient populations by predictable outcomes and personalised treatments. This review discusses the state-of-the-art contributions of systems medicine-based approaches in ILDs over the past 5 years.

FIGURE 1

Systems medicine-based approaches in interstitial lung diseases seek to analyse biological products (e.g. RNA, DNA, proteins, metabolites, microbiome, etc.) and, through massive data generation and integration with clinical features, help to identify biomarkers that can predict disease phenotypes. OTU: operational taxonomic unit; MUC5B: mucin 5B; ICAM-1: intracellular adhesion molecule-1; MMP-7: metalloproteinase-7; TOLLIP: Toll-interacting protein; TERT: telomerase reverse transcriptase.