The End of Medicine as we know it

Abstract
Following the IT revolution, the next socio-economic revolution appears to be a complete redefinition of health and disease, how we define them, how we handle them and how we finance this. Such revolutions follow upon a major crisis, and medicine is in a crisis. Existing drugs fail to provide benefit for most patients. The efficacy of drug discovery is in a constant decline and big pharma about to disappear in its current form by the end of the 2020s. Biomedical research has a poor translational success rate due to false incentives, lack of quality/reproducibility and publication bias. The most important reason and need for change, however, is our current concept of disease, i.e. mostly 19th/20th century-derived and based on organs or symptoms, but hardly every by mechanisms. Without a disease mechanism, however, no curative therapy is possible. Enabled by big-data and interdisciplinary research with applied bioinformaticians, the new Systems Medicine will lead to a mechanism-based redefinition of disease, precision diagnosis and therapy eliminating the need for drug discovery and a complete reorganization of how we teach, train and practice medicine.