Editorial Comments Systems biology: opening new avenues in clinical research

genomics; personalized medicine; systems biology Systems biology as a paradigm shift in clinical research The marked increase in research spending and individual efforts over the years on the development of disease bio-markers, therapeutic targets and new drugs has provided a wealth of information on individual molecular changes as-sociated with disease (characteristic examples, among many others, in the case of nephropathies are provided in [1,2]). Nevertheless, these unquestionably highly signif-icant and important findings have not been translated into the expected clinical outcome [3–5]. This may point to-wards the need for a paradigm shift in the way biomarker and drug discovery is conceived: Identification of an asso-ciation of individual molecules with a specific phenotyp