"Network Medicine: From Cellular Networks to the Human Diseasome"
Abstract
Given the functional interdependencies between the molecular components in a human cell, a disease is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single gene, but reflects the perturbations of the complex intracellular network. The emerging tools of network medicine offer a platform to explore systematically not only the molecular complexity of a particular disease, leading to the identification of disease modules and pathways, but also the molecular relationships between apparently distinct (patho) phenotypes. Advances in this direction are essential to identify new disease genes, to uncover the biological significance of disease-associated mutations identified by genome-wide association studies and full genome sequencing, and to identify drug targets and biomarkers for complex diseases.
Speaker Bio
Albert-László Barabási is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research and holds appointments in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Central European University in Budapest. A native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his Master’s in Theoretical Physics at the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary and Ph.D. at Boston University. Barabási’s latest book, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do (Dutton, 2010), is available in five languages. His previous book Linked: The New Science of Networks (Perseus, 2002) is currently available in fifteen languages. He is the author of Network Science (Cambridge, 2016) and the co-editor of The Structure and Dynamics of Networks (Princeton, 2005) and Network Medicine (Harvard University Press, 2017). His work has led to many breakthroughs, including the discovery of scale-free networks in, which continues to make him one of the most cited scientists today.
Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology in 2005 and the John von Neumann Medal for outstanding achievements in computer science and technology in 2006, the C&C Prize from the NEC Foundation in 2008, the US National Academies of Sciences awarded him the Cozzarelli Prize in 2009, the Lagrange Prize for his contributions to complex systems in 2011, the Prima Primissima Award for his contributions to science in 2014 and the Senior Scientific Award of the Complex Systems Society in 2017. He was elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Romanian Academy, Academia Europaea, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences and he received Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Politécnicade Madrid, University of West Timisoara and Utrecht University.