Section: Application Domains

Systems Biology and Translational medicine

Biological and clinical researches have dramatically changed because of the technological advances, leading to the possibility of measuring much more biological quantities than previously. Clinical research studies can include now traditional measurements such as clinical status, but also thousands of cell populations, peptides, gene expressions for a given patient. This has facilitated the transfer of knowledge from basic to clinical science (from "bench side to bedside") and vice versa, a process often called "Translational medicine". However, the analysis of these large amounts of data needs specific methods, especially when one wants to have a global understanding of the information inherent to complex systems through an "integrative analysis". These systems like the immune system are complex because of many interactions within and between many levels (inside cells, between cells, in different tissues, in various species). This has led to a new field called "Systems biology" rapidly adapted to specific topics such as "Systems Immunology" [55], "Systems vaccinology" [52], "Systems medicine" [44]. From the statistician point of view, two main challenges appear: i) to deal with the massive amount of data ii) to find relevant models capturing observed behaviors.