The next generation of medicine will based upon a redefinition of disease. Disease at its origin, at the cell level, is characterized by elaborate communication within each cell and between cells. These communications, termed “cell signaling,” determine the behavior of the cell which leads to hallmarks of disease.

By identifying signaling pathways, mapping signaling cascades, we can choose to artificially interrupt, “inhibit” or amplify signaling pathways, or should we try another approach?

Can we “guide” healing by targeting multiple pathways at their origins and delivering selective resources to the cellular disease environment? These resources or “agents” affect behavior of cells by diminishing cell stress and promoting proper cell function…interrupting the vicious cycle of chronic inflammatory disease.

These “agents” can also take the form of cell stimuli. In the cell microenvironment, these stimuli can be organized into three categories: nutritional, thermal and mechanical.

Cell signaling evolved into a systems level approach.

“Over the past few years, powerful methodological advances have enabled high-throughput data acquisition in biology, including sequencing of entire genomes, microarray analysis of global patterns of gene expression, evaluation by mass spectrometry of the nature and modification state of cellular proteomes, and genetic and biochemical methods for identifying protein-protein complexes and entire gene and protein interaction networks.”

“As a result, large-scale approaches combined with computational methods are now facilitating the expansion of biochemistry and molecular biology to the whole-systems level.”

Systems biology approaches in cell signaling research, 2005

“The past decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in our knowledge on cancer on multiple scales leading to a host of potential drug targets and subsequent clinical trials. Yet the outcome for many cancers has not improved (1).”

Towards a Science of Tumor Forecasting for Clinical Oncology

T E Yankeelov, V Quaranta, K J Evans, E C Rerich, 2015

“It is now clear that cancerous phenotypes result from the dysregulation of more than 500 genes at multiple steps in cell signaling pathways [19,20]. This indicates that inhibition of a single gene product or cell signaling pathway is unlikely to prevent or treat cancer. However, most current anticancer therapies are based on the modulation of a single target.”

Regulation of survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis of tumor

cells through modulation of inflammatory pathways by nutraceuticals

Subash C. Gupta, Ji Hye Kim, Sahdeo Prasad, and Bharat B. Aggarwal
Cytokine Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Therapeutics,

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center,

Cancer Metastasis Review, 2010