From a Single Gene to the Whole Network

Cancer research once focused for a long time on finding mutations in a single gene. This approach was very important, because certain gene mutations can indeed become key to diagnosis or treatment — for example, some targeted drugs are designed against specific molecular abnormalities. However, cancer is often more complex than a single gene. Many patients' tumors do not have just one obvious switch, but multiple pathways out of balance at the same time.

Therefore, over the past decade or more, I began combining gene co-expression, systems biology, and bioinformatics, hoping to understand cancer at a deeper level. Gene co-expression, simply put, means observing whether large numbers of genes show coordinated changes across different samples. If a group of genes consistently rises or falls together, it suggests they may be under common regulation or participate in the same type of biological function.

This approach helps us move from a single point to a network. Cancer is no longer just one gene going wrong, but an entire regulatory system whose order has been disrupted. Using NPM1/B23 as an entry point, we try to observe its coordinated relationships with other genes, further understanding metastasis, drug resistance, recurrence, and pathway imbalance in cancer.

I often use an analogy to explain this: if the body is a city, a single gene is like one traffic light; a gene co-expression network is like the entire traffic system. When a city has traffic jams, it isn't necessarily just one broken light — it could also be road design, traffic flow, accidents, and coordination all going wrong at once. Looking at only one point, we may miss the reasons for the overall imbalance.

This way of thinking does not replace traditional diagnosis, but offers a complementary perspective. The further science advances, the more I believe that truly effective medicine requires humility: acknowledging the complexity of living systems, and acknowledging that we are still learning how to better serve patients.