Compound Race Pathology: A Friction-Theoretic Framework for Multi-Scale Disease Progression and Intervention

Abstract

A Hypothesis & Theory synthesis and research programme on multi-scale, multi-mechanism ("compound") disease. It builds explicitly on established work — metabolic control analysis and polypharmacology (Moreno-Sánchez et al. 2010), network medicine (Barabási, Gulbahce & Loscalzo 2011), and the autoimmune HSCT/CAR-T literature on tissue reversibility (Sullivan et al. 2018) — and offers a candidate account of why combining interventions across rate-limiting nodes, and matching intervention to substrate reversibility, work as they do. Its predictions are invitations to test, to be read against that established literature. v4 (August 2026). This version sharpens the paper's positioning against the prior formal literature it builds on: the step from distributed metabolic control to multi-target intervention, and the boundedness of single-target intervention, are credited as established results (metabolic control analysis and polypharmacology; robustness and network topology), with the paper's own contribution narrowed to the cross-scale extension, the four-regime classification, and the hysteresis-fighting taxonomy. The multi-stage power-law age-incidence of carcinogenesis is credited to its original account and its exponent recast as a testable quantity; a network-medicine anchor for single-agent insufficiency is added. Editorial pass. Earlier versions remain in the version history.