Mapping the human 'diseasome'

A map created by Harvard biologist Marc Vidal and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, now a physicist at Northeastern University, plots diseases by the genes they have in common — something like the charts linking actors to one another (and ultimately to Kevin Bacon) based on the movies they appeared in together, as a story in today's New York Times describes it. They called it the "diseasome" in a paper they published last year.

Its concepts are changing the field of disease classification, the story says, including different kinds of cancer.

“In the not too distant future, we will think about these diseases based on the molecular pathways that are aberrant, rather than the anatomical origin of the tumor,” Dr. Todd Golub, director of the cancer program at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, told the Times.