Plenary Lecture

Current state and future of Omics-based medicine and systems pathobiology

Professor Hiroshi Tanaka
School of Biomedical Sciences,
Tokyo Medical and Dental University
Japan
E-mail: tanaka@cim.tmd.ac.jp

Abstract: In spite of the rapid increase of the biomolecular (“omics”) data such as genome, transcriptome, proteome and so forth, the substantial application of omics data to clinical medicine has not been realized yet. This might be ascribed to the fact that there has neither been explored nor established the systemic framework where the omics data are efficiently utilized in clinical medicine.
We have just started the national project for comprehensive omics-based disease database. In constructing the database, we adopted a new paradigm for viewing the disease as "a unified system", in which disease is described in the hierarchy of the clinical, pathophysiological and molecular omics, based on the leading concept that “disease organizes itself to form a unified system": we call this paradigm “omics-based systems pathobiology”.

In our clinical omics database the relations between these molecular and clinicopathological data are explored by applying the data-mining method. After establishing the inter-hierarchical relation, we integrate these data into the unified hierarchical disease model.We also developed the user-directed functions such as deductive retrieval which replies various inquiries, for example, given the clinical syndrome, infer the possible molecular process of disease, or given the omics data, predict the prognosis of disease, etc. In constructing this database, we aim to establish new clinical medicine integrating clinical and omics data for realizing "predictive individualized medicine".


Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Prof. Hiroshi Tanaka graduated from the University of Tokyo, Department of Mathematical Engineering in 1974. He received Dr. Med. from Graduate School of Medicine in 1981 and Ph.D. from Graduate School of Engineering in 1983, both at University of Tokyo. His thesis was related to the computational physiology, especially biomedical inverse problems.
He was appointed as Assistant Professor from 1982 to1987, at Institute for Medical Electronics, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo. During this period, he　stayed in Sweden and studied biosystems analysis from 1982 to1984 in Uppsala University and Linkoping University as Visiting Scientist. In 1987 he moved to Department of Medical Informatics, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine.
In 1990, he was visiting scientist in MIT Laboratory of Computer Science, where he began the study of bioinformatics which he now majors in. After returning Japan, He was appointed as Professor of Bioinfomatics, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 1991. He is now also the director of the Information Center for Medicine at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. From 2004 to 2007 he was the president of Japanese association of medical informatics. In 2003, He was also appointed as professor of systems biology, and Dean of Biomedical Science Ph.D. Program, Tokyo Medical and Dental University. He is now responsible for promoting many government-commissioned projects of genome / omics-based medicines.