COVID-19 forced stakeholders in the healthcare landscape to adopt a new perspective in this sphere. Telemedicine rose to fame as a ready-made solution; artificial intelligence’s contribution became more apparent from early outbreak predictions to resource management; and digital health technologies lent a helping hand early on.

Another promising area joining the fight is network medicine, a branch of network science. The latter field studies the interaction between actors within a network. Such analyses are applicable to virtually any sector, from the world wide web through social networks to how molecules interact with each other. Applying such theories to human biology yields network medicine; the study of biological networks to better understand and help treat diseases.

One of network medicine’s pioneers is Albert-László Barabási, a distinguished university professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and his research lab, the BarabasiLab. In less than 10 days since repurposing their network medicine toolset to find a treatment for COVID-19, the BarabasiLab had a list of promising drugs for testing in human cell lines in an experimental lab. We turned to Prof. Barabási for additional insights regarding network medicine’s contribution in the COVID-19 fight. But first, let’s get acquainted with the science in question before turning to the scientists behind it.

Source: medicalfuturist.com