• Jeremy D Scheff, Panteleimon D Mavroudis, Steve E Calvano, and Ioannis P Androulakis.
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.
• J Clin Monit Comput. 2013 Aug 1; 27 (4): 405-15.

AbstractDysregulation of the inflammatory response is a critical component of many clinically challenging disorders such as sepsis. Inflammation is a biological process designed to lead to healing and recovery, ultimately restoring homeostasis; however, the failure to fully achieve those beneficial results can leave a patient in a dangerous persistent inflammatory state. One of the primary challenges in developing novel therapies in this area is that inflammation is comprised of a complex network of interacting pathways. Here, we discuss our approaches towards addressing this problem through computational systems biology, with a particular focus on how the presence of biological rhythms and the disruption of these rhythms in inflammation may be applied in a translational context. By leveraging the information content embedded in physiologic variability, ranging in scale from oscillations in autonomic activity driving short-term heart rate variability to circadian rhythms in immunomodulatory hormones, there is significant potential to gain insight into the underlying physiology.

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