Most of healthcare is still very focused on after you become ill. We want to
change the dialogue and develop the science around
ideally prevention of the illness. Then when we can't prevent, at least early
detection, so that we can intervene early for better outcomes.
The Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center, the PHIND Center,
is a relatively new effort to try to really tackle being much more proactive about
healthcare. The Precision Health part is, again, the
focus on keeping people healthy as opposed to reacting after they're
already ill. And the integrated diagnostics part is about integrating
multiple sources of information. We want to fund novel new ideas, bring together
scientists from multiple disciplines all over campus in healthcare and
engineering, chemistry, physics psychology, computational sciences, to approach a
Precision Health problem.
We're interested in developing approaches to ultimately detect cancer
at the earliest possible stages, so we're measuring molecular features that are
present in the blood that can give us a readout on the state of healthy or
diseased cells. If we can catch the hallmarks, the signatures, of early
malignancy, at a stage where we can readily treat it, we stand a far better
chance of curing patients, then we want to roll the clock back on when we can
pick this up.
We have a cohort of about 200 boys and girls that we started studying when they
were 8 to 10 years old. So, it's a large data set that we're going to be able to
then integrate to predict the onset of depression, the onset of suicidal
ideation, suicide attempts in some of these children. If we can identify what
that risk profile looks like then we can try to develop prevention programs that
target those mechanisms that we're identifying that we think are going to
contribute to the development of depression and suicidal ideation to
change those mechanisms.
Diabetes is a huge problem. It's estimated to cost the U.S. close to 300
billion dollars each year and what's amazing is that nine out of ten people
who have pre-diabetes have no idea. So, a big part of our PHIND project is actually to
try and understand exactly what foods spike their glucose and then come up with
some machine learning methods -- what that means is some computer technologies -- to
be able to understand for that person what's causing them to spike, what's not,
and then actually making recommendations. We're going to help each person
individually according to what is good for them and to have them avoid what's
actually bad for them.
Our hope is that by the time you're born we'd know what diseases you're going to
be at risk for. This does not mean that there still won't be need for hospitals
but the goal will be to keep people healthy as long as possible by doing
more continuous monitoring and earlier interventions.
If the 19th century was
about chemistry, and the 20th century was about physics, the 21st century is for
sure about biomedicine. We're seeing people from fields that previously
hadn't been that concerned about biology and medicine looking at and being focused on
biomedical problems. The problems that we confront and want to have impact in with
Precision Health are so complex that to really tackle them effectively we have
to bring together people from different disciplines with complimentary talents
in ways that break down these problems and achieve the solutions that we want
to see.