[Systems biology and personalized medicine: to be or not to be?].

The review is devoted to the widely discussed problems of the feasibility of "systems biology" and "P4-personalized (systems) medicine" from the standpoint of complex living systems. The following conclusions are made. 1. It is impossible to reach the ultimate goals of systems biology and medicine based solely on data of genomics and other 'omics'. Systems biology may be efficient for an approximate description of certain functional modules provided that there are experimental data for the majority of the components of the system under study. 2. P4-personalized (systems) medicine based on systems biology is unrealistic fundamentally and technically, as well as from the economic point of view. 3. A possible way is to search for the targets common for all or for large groups of individuals, and the development of postgenomic generalized medicine. 4. Also realistic are some of currently developing options of personalized medicine, such as e. g. the use of patient stem cells that are returned to the patient after culturing, or of gene-modified infiltrating T-lymphocytes in so-called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cancer therapy. CAR therapy is a personalized treatment that uses T-lymphocytes taken from a patient and gene-modified in such a way that to recognize and kill cancer cells. 5. Despite of numerous claims, the paradigms of the postgenomic sciences were not changed. Traditional approaches of molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, and physiology still remain in force in the postgenomic era. They are enforced due to the data obtained by 'omics'. These data may be a base for putting forward and testing hypotheses about the mechanisms of functional processes.