Environmental Alterations and Oncological Diseases: The Contribution of Network Medicine

The majority of cancers are due to sporadic mutations happening during the lifetime. In the present review I discuss the involvement of environmental alterations, such as climate change or chemicals factors in the water and food, in the development of diseases like cancer considering particular cross-reactions. The view put forward this review is the use of network medicine to study the complex interactions between many pollutants. In the era of “BigData” and thanks to the high performance of computers and their capacity to store and analyze a large amount of data, we are able to identify emergent properties of a complex system and to build robust models capable to predicting and exploring the dynamics of a pathological system or the development from a physiological system to a pathological one.