System Medicine and Translational Medicine

In this perspective study, the authors introduce the background, goals, and roadmap of Translational Medicine, address the differences between oriental and western medicines, as well as their development tendency, and then discuss the developments in and prospects for the System Medicine. The advantages of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) lie in its guidelines based on the holism and systems theory; its methodology based on the theory as “the harmony between humans and nature” to regulate the body's balance; and its personalized treatment with TCM formulas. However, modernization of TCM still faces some challenges: how to translate the self-explanatory closed system into an receptively open system; how to achieve the combination, integration, and convergence of TCM with other modern sciences and technologies (such as systems biology); how to implement the modern scientific mode, methodologies, and achievements in the study of TCM, and interpret it with data instead words. Although there is a large difference between the oriental and western medicine systems, the trend of complementary development and integration of both is irresistible. We should try to push the progress in the combination, integration, and convergence of oriental and western medicines to welcome the emergence of System Medicines in the 21st century. The development of System Medicine may have following requirements and characteristics: first, the integrated research on medicine and pharmacy requires the “system–system” interaction character between the drug system and biological system; second, the clinical diagnosis system by the combination of disease and syndrome requires an integrative expression, including some quantitative indexes of syndromes in TCM, some pathological and biochemical indexes as well as imaging diagnostic markers in western medicine, and some biomarkers, such as genes, proteins, and metabolites discovered by systems biology studies; third, a clinical-treatment mode based on the correspondence of formula, disease and syndrome requires that the pattern of compound drugs be widely used for the human system by the combination of disease and syndrome, in order to achieve goals known as “correspondence of formula, disease and syndrome, comprehensive management and systematic condition” fourth, the research and development (R&D) mode of new drugs require “participation of physicians and combination of medicine and pharmacy”, which is a route known as “Beside-Bench-Beside” fifth, the representation of compound drugs and human system requires the combination of macroscopic characterization and microcosmic feature, also the combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses.