1 Network Medicine and Alzheimer ’ s Disease Therapy 2

Juliet T. Jarrell 1, Li Gao 2, David S. Cohen 1 and Xudong Huang 1,* 3 1 Neurochemistry Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard 4 Medical School, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA; 5 2 Modern Research Center for Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China. 6 * Correspondence: Huang.Xudong@mgh.harvard.edu; Tel. +001-617-724-9778 7 8 9 Abstract: Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative condition that currently has no known 10 cure. The principles of the expanding field of network medicine (NM) have recently been applied to 11 AD research. The main principle of NM proposes that diseases are much more complicated than one 12 mutation in one gene, and incorporate different genes, connections between genes, and pathways 13 that may include multiple diseases to create full scale disease networks. AD research findings as a 14 result of the application of NM principles have suggested that functional network connectivity, 15 myelination, myeloid cells, and genes and pathways may play an integral role in AD progression, 16 and may be integral to the search for a cure. Different aspects of the AD pathology could be potential 17 targets for drug therapy to slow down or stop the disease from advancing, but more research is 18 needed to reach definitive conclusions. Additionally, the holistic approaches of network 19 pharmacology in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) research may be viable options for the AD 20 treatment, and may lead to an effective cure for AD in the future. 21