Prof. Dr. Ursula Klingmüller in the anniversary editio…

Date

2026-02-18

Location

Cell Systems - A Cell Press Journal

Prof. Dr. Ursula Klingmüller (DKFZ Heidelberg) wrote an article as one of the ‘Voices’ in the 10th anniversary edition of Cell Systems - A CellPress Journal.

The Question to the Voices:

„What questions currently beyond reach do you hope systems approaches will enable addressing in the next decade?"

Her answer:

"Conquering diseases by disentangling complexity of interorgan communication"

The maintenance of health and the prevention of disease are determined by a highly complex network of interactions occurring at multiple biological levels and involving different organs. Environmental exposure, including air pollution and nutrition, together with genetic predisposition affect these interactions to different degrees, resulting in highly heterogenous responses and in disease trajectories that are difficult to predict. Addressing this complexity requires the integrative collection of clinical data and high-quality patient samples across clinical disciplines, advances in high-throughput quantitative technologies and phenotypic response profiling, and the combination of AI-based approaches with mechanistic mathematical modeling. Together these developments foster the establishment of biomarker panels for model-based risk assessment of disease development in individual patients. As diseases are dynamic processes that can advance over years, longitudinal patient information has to be considered to gain insights into mechanisms determining dynamic behavior. This requires the standardized acquisition, processing, and sharing of multi-level clinical and molecular data, as well as the exploitation of diverse modeling strategies for the development of digital twins. These integrative modeling approaches are essential to reduce costs by enabling precision clinical trials and to develop clinical decision support systems that assist clinicians in providing optimized care for individual patients. Finally, actively involving patients in these efforts facilitates personalized surveillance, improves prevention and early detection of diseases, and empowers individuals to preserve health and quality of life.