Diseasome
2007–2021

The Human Disease Network | video commentary by Albert-László Barabási
The projects on display in this section reflect the BarabásiLab’s longstanding engagement with aspects of medicine, such as human diseases, genetics, and most recently, the search for effective drugs for COVID-19.

The publication of the draft of the human genome in 2001 has contributed to an explosion of research in genetics, allowing researchers to link diseases to specific genes. 2005 to 2006, Albert-László Barabási was working at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School in the USA and found himself wondering what these many independent discoveries said about the relationships between diseases. »The Human Disease Network«, published in 2007, visualizes the deep genetic connectedness of diseases. Each node of the network shows a different disease. The classes to which the diseases belong are marked in color: cancers are in the blue color spectrum, neuronal diseases in the red. The size of the node reflects the number of genes responsible for the disease; this was the first time BarabásiLab encoded information in node size. The links correspond to the genes that connect the two diseases, capturing their common genetic roots. The process images shown here document the evolution of the visualization up to the final design. »The Human Disease Network« is one of the BarabásiLab’s most reproduced network visualizations.
Drugging COVID (2020–2021)

The Human Genome Project (2021)


Interactome (2012)
Interactome | video commentary by Albert-László Barabási
