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Aims of the conference:

• To bring together and foster exchange between systems biology experts and hepatologists
• To contribute to a European platform for systems biology and systems genetics of liver diseases
• To present a tool box of systems biology to facilitate our understanding of dynamic liver functions in normal and diseased states
• To discuss future perspectives and challenges for systems biology and genetics of liver diseases
• To estimate chances and challenges of systems biology studies to solve unmet medical needs in hepatology

Co-organised by:

• European Systems Genetics Network (SYSGENET, BMBS COST Action BM0901)
• Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, Université de Luxembourg (LCSB)
• Virtual Liver Network, German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF)
• Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 57 Organ Fibrosis (DFG)

Background:

Systems biology represents a new frontier in biomedical research. During the last decades a "reductionist approach" mainly based on molecular biology and biochemistry methods has successfully identified many of the mechanisms and interactions of complex systems and organs such as the liver. However, this approach offers no comprehensive insight how system properties emerge and are disturbed during diseases. Therefore, the plethora of causes and effects in biological networks might be better addressed by observing, through quantitative measures, multiple components simultaneously and by rigorous data integration across elaborate mathematical models. The key objective of systems biology is to model the interactions in a system by as complete as possible system-wide experimental techniques, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and high-throughput phenotyping to provide quantitative data for construction and validation of models and networks that explain the systems' properties.

Previous work has already expanded our understanding of liver diseases from a systems biology perspective, in particular at the genome and transcriptome level. However, despite the rapid development of proteomic and metabolomic studies and the potential to improve the understanding and treatment of liver diseases, opportunities to discuss the diverse facets of systems biology from data generation to integration among experts in the field remain rare. EASL is the very first organization worldwide that presents a conference on liver with focus on systems biology.