Systems Biology and Medicine - Period 6 Business & Economics Program Spring 2020 Semester - Extended - Amsterdam

Networks appear to be crucial anywhere now, be they social networks (facebook), economic networks (companies), or biological networks determining health. Most diseases are caused by the malfunctioning of the networks that determine our health, where many of the latter are cellular or molecular networks in our body. Type-2 diabetes is for instance caused by a failing interplay between pancreatic beta cells, their regulated protein synthesis machinery, the insulin receptor on peripheral tissues. glucose metabolism in liver, glucose uptake by the intestine and the microbiota within the later. Similarly, cancer is a network disease, caused by a variety of alterations in a number of gene. All too long, medicine has been unable to deal properly with the multifactorial nature of many human diseases, but in the 2010s multiple breakthroughs in personalized systems medicine have been achieved or are in the making. Human bodies are systems (networks of components that are different from the sum of these components) and it is therefore systems medicine that is called for. It is only in the present century that genomics, functional genomics and systems or network biology have developed sufficiently to bring about a breakthrough in the understanding and therapy of disease. The present course familiarizes its participants with the biological networks that determine the functioning of the human and associated organisms. This extends from intracellular molecular networks to the networking of the human with the microbes in the intestines, vagina, and on the skin. Metabolic as much as signaling and gene-expression networks are involved. The diversity of network functioning between human individuals as well as between different individual cells in tumors, is addressed in the course, with the consequent implications for drug resistance. The course teaches the student how to approach these networks using simple bioinformatics and modelling techniques, downloading and then analyzing data through the wwweb, and arguing in terms of recently discovered principles that determine network functioning. Furthermore the course will provide the students with new insights in (a) dominant multifactorial diseases such as cancer and obesity/metabolic syndrome/diabetes mellitus, (b) inborn errors of metabolism, (c) infectious diseases and (d) aging diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's. The course will highlight a number of new methods through which new therapies may be designed, some of which make the use of experimental animals unnecessary.

The course will pay considerable attention to personalized medicine and nutrition and to the use of the genome-wide metabolic map therein. The hitherto persistent separation between 'Nature' (the genes) and ?Nurture? (nutrition, lifestyle and environment) will be removed, as will be the barrier between traditional and modern medicine. The student himself will be enabled to (i) figure out where in a network the best targets are for medicinal drugs or other agents to improve network function, (ii) show why it should be a good idea to target multiple network hubs at the same time and how to determine which, (iii) demonstrate how disease probability can be predicted somewhat from an individual's genome sequence, (iv) show how this might help physicians to come with individual advice with respect to medicine and nutrition, and (v) experience how functional genomic, physiological, and dispositional information may be integrated.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) awards credits based on the ECTS system. Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.