Cancer bioinformatics: A new approach to systems clinical medicine

Cancer is one of the commonest causes of patient death in the clinic and a complex disease occurring in multiple organs per system, multiple systems per organ, or both, in the body. The poor diagnoses, therapies and prognoses of the disease could be mainly due to the variation of severities, durations, locations, sensitivity and resistance against drugs, cell differentiation and origin, and understanding of pathogenesis. With increasing evidence that the interaction and network between genes and proteins play an important role in investigation of cancer molecular mechanisms, it is necessary and important to introduce a new concept of Systems Clinical Medicine into cancer research, to integrate systems biology, clinical science, omics-based technology, bioinformatics and computational science to improve diagnosis, therapies and prognosis of diseases. Cancer bioinformatics is a critical and important part of the systems clinical medicine in cancer and the core tool and approach to carry out the investigations of cancer in systems clinical medicine. “Thematic Series on Cancer Bioinformatics” gather the strength of BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Cancer, Genome Medicine and Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics to headline the application of cancer bioinformatics for the development of bioinformatics methods, network biomarkers and precision medicine. The Series focuses on new developments in cancer bioinformatics and computational systems biology to explore the potential of clinical applications and improve the outcomes of patients with cancer.