Research and education for biomedical informatics at Tokyo Medical and Dental University.

OBJECTIVES Based on a basic concept of "Systems Life Science: understanding life and disease as a unified system", we move forward in research, empirical implementation, and making contributions to healthcare policy. METHODS We integrate bioinformatics and medical informatics for identifying critical issues in biological science and solving medical challenges with a concept of "Systems Life Science" which consists of "Systems Evolutionary Biology" for basic science, "Systems Pathology" for clinical sciences, and an empirical medical informatics for future medicine. RESULTS Our laboratory is an integrated laboratory consisting of a computational biology group in the School of Biomedical Sciences (SBS), a bioinformatics group in the Medical Research Institute (MRI), and a medical informatics group in the Information Center for Medical Sciences (ICMS) with a philosophy of "Empirical Systems Life Science". CONCLUSIONS Based on the philosophy of "Empirical Systems Life Science", we continue to forward our research, education, systems implementations, and international standardization efforts. We believe that this approach will become a fundamental and effective way to uncover many of the secrets of life processes, and to help/solve complex issues for future medicine in this post genomic era with exceedingly rapidly growing amounts of -omics data and knowledge.