Investigación e innovación biomédica avanzada

Unsolved Mysteries: from Reductionism to Holistic Approaches in Medicine: Lessons from Immunculus

Alexander Poletaev, Maryam Salili and Mohammad Ebrahimi

Human organism as an essentially complex multi-level biological system operates as a holistic unit. All parts of a living organism are totally integrated and most properties of complex systems, as any other complex system, fundamentally are not derived from distinct properties of separate system components. Therefore it is a widely accepted that dynamically changing behavior of biological system cannot be predicted correctly on the basis of the study of its isolated components. Therefore, to grasp the physiological processes of complex living system the reductionist approach is basically inadequate. In this article, we take a look at cancer and autism as examples of chronic disease that require a system approach for study and early diagnose, and describe immunculus technology, instead of the reductionist approach, which can be challenging for early detection of chronic disease.