Chronic lung diseases

Chronic lung diseases often have high morbidity and mortality rate and have posed a serious threat to human health. The incidence of many chronic lung diseases such as asthma has been on the rise in the past decade, which causes serious economic burden. Despite many efforts which employed traditional experimental approaches to elucidate the mechanisms of the diseases have been made, little is known about the pathogenesis of complex lung diseases. Systems biology approaches which aim to integrate and analyze information gathered from multiple sources offer a great opportunity to examine complex human diseases from a new angle. Many attempts have been made using high-throughput technologies such as microarrays to study chronic lung diseases; although compared with the full-fledged systems biology approach, research strategies employed in most of these investigations still have much room to improve, promising findings have already emerged from these efforts, which demonstrates the potential of implementing systems biology in pulmonary biomedical research. (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. WIREs Syst Biol Med 2009 1 298-308