Deciphering Dynamic Systems in Childhood
The question
Childhood is one of the most dynamic phases of human life: a period of rapid growth and development that sets the trajectory for lifelong health. When serious illnesses such as sepsis, rare metabolic disorders or childhood cancers strike early in life, they disrupt these dynamics. Yet in current practice, diseases are primarily described with static snapshots: blood tests, scans, or labels captured at certain time points used in historic taxonomies of disease. This frames disease as a fixed deviation from health, rather than a shifting imbalance.
The Deciphering Dynamic Systems in Childhood project investigates childhood disease as a dynamic process from a molecular perspective. It asks two fundamental questions: Can disruptions at the molecular level reveal mechanisms, individual vulnerabilities and treatment opportunities that today’s mostly binary disease classifications miss? Can the integration of multilevel data from children with critical illness, inherited metabolic diseases, and cancer unravel patterns underlying disease trajectories?
The approach
To answer these questions, the project is studying molecular mechanisms surrounding metabolism and host response at the core of life-threatening childhood diseases. Based at a children’s hospital, it unites researchers in metabolism, critical care and oncology. These teams are jointly developing and combining biological measurements from high-resolution in vivo molecular profiling, including sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics and fluxomics, with longitudinal clinical data.
Applying mathematical modeling and AI, the researchers can then identify dynamic networks underlying the shift in health trajectories. Their work builds on local biorepositories from thousands of patient encounters. By exploring metabolism and host response as central anchors linking health and disease, the project could reveal new ways of understanding and treating childhood disease.
The project is being led by Luregn Schlapbach and Raphael Morscher at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich in Switzerland.
Feature image by Barbora Prekopová / Kinderspital Zürich
NOMIS researchers
Raphael J. Morscher is an attending physician in pediatric oncology at the University Children's Hospital Zurich and group leader in Pediatric Cancer Metabolism at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is co-leading the project Deciphering Dynamic Systems in Childhood.
Attending physician in pediatric oncology
University Children's Hospital Zurich
Luregn Schlapbach is head of the Department of Intensive Care and Neonatology at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, and holds the Professorship for Pediatric Intensive Care at the University of Zurich.
Head of Intensive Care and Neonatology
University Children's Hospital Zurich
