Presented by Lee Hood
Abstract
Systems medicine, the application of systems approaches to disease, places medicine at a fascinating tipping point—promising a revolution in the practice of healthcare. I will discuss how systems biology approaches have framed systems medicine and I will discuss some of the new systems-driven technologies and strategies that have catalyzed this tipping point. There are special opportunities for nanosciences and chemistry in the generation of systems-driven tools for the analyses of single molecules, single cells and the assessment of the complexities of deciphering human complexity. Moreover, four converging thrusts—systems medicine (various technologies), big data (and its analytics), the digitalization of personal measurements and patient-activated social networks—are leading to a proactive healthcare that is predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory (P4). I will contrast P4 healthcare, embodying 21st Century Medicine, with contemporary medicine and discuss its societal implications for healthcare. P4 healthcare has two central thrusts—wellness and disease. I will discuss our successful effort to introduce P4 healthcare into the current healthcare system with a P4 pilot program on scientific (quantitative) wellness—a longitudinal, high-dimensional data cloud (personal, dense, dynamic data clouds) study on each of 108 well patients over 2014.
In 2015, we started the company Arivale to bring scientific wellness to consumers and it now has more than 4000 clients. I will discuss the new insights emerging from computational studies of all of these personal data clouds.
In 2016, my institute, the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), affiliated with Providence St. Joseph Health to become its research arm and I became its Chief Science Officer. This enables us to bring 21st century medicine to the US healthcare system in the form of a series of clinical trials for scientific wellness, Alzheimeri’s Disease and many other diseases employing personal, dense, dynamic data clouds. These data will provide new approaches to the elucidation of wellness and disease mechanism as well as the identification of relevant biomarkers and even novel drug target candidates. The nanosciences will play a critical role in miniaturizing the genomics and omic human assays, increasing their throughput and reducing their costs.