For long, some intestinal inflammation such as Crohn's Disease have been tormenting patients but their causes and processes are not yet that clear. In a recent academic paper "The Metabolomic Physics of Complex Diseases" published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a Chinese statistical and algebraic topology team attempts to help deepen such research via mathematical methods.

Professor Wu Rongling, who is also deputy dean of Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications(BIMSA), introduced the findings at a news conference. By far researchers know there are close connections between the occurrence of diseases and changes in metabolism, but the scientific methods available now can only describe a single key metabolite without considering the fact that the intrinsic features of complex diseases are multi-factorial, dynamic, heterogeneous and interdependent.

In response to this, the research team has combined ecosystem theory and evolutionary game theory to create a statistical physical model of complex diseases for the first time, which enables it to analyze and infer the causal relationships between internal variables in the system, integrate all metabolites into a two-way, signed, and weighted interaction network, and trace how information flow from one metabolite to another causes changes in health status.

The research team also applied the homology theory in algebraic topology to network analysis, using the GLMY homology theory recently developed by renowned mathematician Shing-Tung Yau and his collaborators to quantitatively analyze the network. "By applying this model to real data, we were able to identify several central metabolites and their interaction networks, which play a key role in the formation of inflammatory bowel disease," added Wu, hoping that the research could provide powerful guidance for future drug design and medical treatment.

Yau, who is also dean of Qiuzhen College, Tsinghua University, stressed the importance of fundamental sciences such as physics and mathematics to society, as well as the importance of applying theories of fundamental sciences in reality. "Applied maths is not only theoretical research, but also needs to be combined with real issues so as to provide solutions to the society," he said.

Fan Ziqi contributed to this article.