(Key points: By applying a principle of holistic approach and armed with omics research tools sooner many diseases such as cancer will have a clear and coherent mechanism figure, which will enable us not only easily detecting the disease, but also precisely targeting its most vulnerable points so the diseases can be cured.)
Every author wants to give a good impression to the audience. But sometimes a presentation may result in an unexpected result. Several years ago when a prestigious biological journal published a review article about research results on tumor growth in the past decades, the summary figure in the paper truly looked like as an artist’s painting with several hundred crossed and parallel lines connected with several hundred dots. When I saw the figure, I wondered what will happen if researchers continually add dots and lines. Someday it will run out of space and the whole figure becomes a black sheet, a totally black out.
Yes, this is a real modern phenomenon. As we add more information by publishing more papers, the picture is not getting any better. The opposite actually happens. We get more and more confusion. In recent years system biology gradually entered the mainstream research community and most prestigious scientific journals are full of those research results. Did anybody get truly exciting about those last progresses? Do doctors who badly need better medicine feel even more optimistic about our understanding the mechanism of the diseases like cancer?
No. Not much. The reason maybe rest on a problem on how we obtain those data and the manner we process them. Without keeping patient in mind and knowing what’s the disease and how it affect each real individual, those data are just data, cold and meaningless data.
One fundamental problem in today’s research and development is lacking of the holistic principle and playing all those data just as playing with number game. Never mind the disease as a dynamic process and happening in a living organism. As a result there is a great disconnection between what scientists are doing and what happen in the real world. I remembered vividly when a venture capitalist gave a reason why he didn’t invest as much as he would like in the biotech/pharmaceutical industry. He said every time the scientists present their beautiful figures and wonderful results. After failed in real human trials, the excuse is always unreasonable such as a difference between a animal and human.
As omics study gets improved they will generate even more data. The last develop in flow cytometry with time-of-flight mass spectrometry can easily produce terabyte data points. If we don’t change our research culture, we will definitely lose and down in a data ocean, or worse, a data tsunami.
With the principle of holistic analysis the day will come when many diseases will have clear and simple mechanism figures. This victory will most likely happen in cancer field first because there are innumerous data and information have been generated in this field.
Those mechanism figure will enable us understand the disease at a level never reached before. It will be coherent and comprehensive. The figure will not only serve as diagnostic marker, but also as a target for precision treatment. It will make the “detection (a lesion) equals destruction” become a reality for many deadly diseases.
Wow! For those marvelous disease mechanism figures we only wish you show up quickly and early so a lot of pains could be relieved and many unnecessary deaths could be avoided.
(This article is the fifth in a series of “the Brand New Mindset for Cancer” essays. It was published on 9/2/2011.)
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