It seeks to understand how drugs affect the human body as a single complex biological system.
In 1992, an article on systems medicine and pharmacology was published in China.
[1] Networks of interaction may include chemical-protein, protein–protein, genetic, signalling and physiological (at cellular, tissue, organ and whole body levels).
Systems pharmacology uses bioinformatics and statistics techniques to integrate and interpret these networks.
Systems pharmacology can be applied to drug safety studies as a complement to pharmacoepidemiology.