Healthcare must become increasingly focused on extending healthspan and not only on treating disease. Indeed, this transition is essential to satisfactorily deal with the chronic diseases that account for the vast majority of healthcare costs today. To enable the precision health strategies of the future — what Lee Hood and I call The Age of Scientific Wellness (book, Harvard Press) — it is necessary to generate not only genomic data but also a large amount of longitudinal multi-omic data on healthy people to quantify the health phenotype and to observe the earliest transitions to disease in order to enable predictive and preventive medicine. I will discuss how we have used such longitudinal 'deep phenotyping’ data to: (1) map out the manifestation of genetic risk in the body, giving insight into intervention strategies to pre-emptively reduce disease risk on a personalized basis; (2) inform about how our gut microbiome and blood metabolites are related, and how the gut microbiome becomes more unique to each individual in healthy aging; (3) how the success of lifestyle/dietary-aimed interventions is quantitatively predicted by personal genetics, and (4) technological advancements to make gathering these data easier and cheaper for people, and (5) how digital twins provide new insights into deep personalization for brain health and new strategies for multi-modal clinical trials. Taken together, such approaches hold tremendous promise for the future of health optimization and personalized, preventive medicine.
Dr. Nathan Price is Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne HealthTech (NASDAQ: THRN) and author of The Age of Scientific Wellness. Previously he was CEO of Onegevity, an AI health intelligence company that merged with Thorne prior to the IPO in 2021. In 2019, he was named as one of the 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2021 he was appointed to the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He spent much of his earlier career as Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Systems Biology (now on leave), co-director with biotechnology pioneer Lee Hood of the Hood-Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine, and is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington in Bioengineering and Computer Science & Engineering. He is a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, received the 2016 Grace A. Goldsmith award for his work pioneering ‘scientific wellness’, was a co-founder of Arivale, and received a Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award from the National Academy of Medicine in 2020. He has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and given over 200 talks and keynotes. He also served as Chair of the NIH Study Section on Modeling and Analysis of Biological Systems (MABS) and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering.