Our main objective is to gather a critical mass of researchers and stakeholders from different disciplines and coordinate these researchers as a team to define and investigate important S&T challenges in multiscale systems medicine, and to improve existing and develop novel solutions for multiscale systems medicine

Human health and disease are characterized by a complex interplay of multiple factors from the genome to the exposome. For many complex diseases, a sufficiently detailed understanding of the underlying mechanisms has remained elusive, and therefore the development of effective cures continues to be major challenge. As a result, the socioeconomic burden (morbidity, mortality, financial cost) of complex diseases remains high and is likely to grow within Europe’s aging population. Systems medicine is an emerging interdisciplinary framework that aims to improve our understanding, prevention and treatment of complex diseases by integrating knowledge and data across multiple levels of biomedical organization. The clinical and societal drivers of systems medicine include

(i) predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine (P4 medicine);

(ii) drugs and vaccines combined with patient stratification approaches;

(iii) biomarkers and their multi-dimensional combination;

(iv) rational design of therapies;

(v) reduction of healthcare costs.

The ultimate challenge and vision of multiscale systems medicine is a radical paradigm shift from a scale-specific reductionistic medicine to multiscale systems medicine. The main specific S&T challenge of this COST Action has two elements:

(A) To develop novel multiscale systems medicine concepts, methods and technologies that provide effective, efficient and economical solutions for emerging and future approaches to multiscale systems medicine.

(B) To develop a transdisciplinary multiscale systems medicine framework that integrates systems medicine, multiscale modelling, multiscale data science, and multiscale computing