Infrastructures for systems medicine in Iran's health roadmap

Systems medicine denotes a paradigm shift in medicine that arising from fundamental thoughts in systems biology. Systems medicine looks at health and disease using systems approaches. Systems or holistic approaches to studying the complexities of disease, emerging measurement and visualization molecular technologies to exploring of patient data space, and new computational and mathematical tools are fundamentals for this revolution in medicine. In order to explore the scientific/technological key objectives for systems medicine in “Iran’s Scientific Map in the Health Sector”, the details of goals, policies and requisites of Iran’s Health Roadmap were compared with horizontal and vertical policies of “National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research in U.S.A”. A great attention has been paid on information technology, networking, interdisciplinary approach, innovation and high- risk research in Iran’s Health Roadmap. However, areas of research such as biological pathways (including metabolomics) and networks; structural biology; molecular libraries and imaging; bioinformatics and computational biology; and human genome have not been adequately addressed. In order to react to waves of systems medicine, as a megatrend in health, Iran’s Scientific Map in the Health Sector should be synthesized to paradigm shift of emerging technologies in biomedicine. A framework for a broad interdisciplinary approach in biomedical research should be addressed to change medicine from reactive to proactive.