Systems biology in drug discovery and development

The complexity of human biology makes it challenging to develop safe and effective new medicines. Systems biology omics-based efforts have led to an explosion of high-throughput data and focus is now shifting to the integration of diverse data types to connect molecular and pathway information to predict disease outcomes. Better models of human disease biology, including more integrated network-based models that can accommodate multiple omics data types, as well as more relevant experimental systems, will help predict drug effects in patients, enabling personalized medicine, improvement of the success rate of new drugs in the clinic, and the finding of new uses for existing drugs.