Jeffrey Bland recaps an ISB symposium on emerging technologies in systems biology, covering low-cost global-health innovations like premature-birth interventions in Malawi, advances in immuno-oncology including PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors for melanoma, and the convergence of genomics and personalized lifestyle medicine. He expresses cautious optimism about making these technologies accessible to broader populations.
Chapters
So what am I sharing with you here? This is like show and tell at school, right? This is a brochure from a meeting that I just attended, a two day meeting at the Institutes for System Biology in Seattle, Washington. Emerging Technologies for System Biology. And oh my word, was this an experience. I wish you all could have been there because truly it was one of those treasure trove of new information from world's leaders. And I can say that in a sound bite, what I took away from this meeting was the hopeful optimism that our science is becoming more humanistic, more translational and really going to deliver itself not just to the select few who can afford to pay, but to a broader population to really reduce human suffering and to focus itself in on solution to some of the major problems that really reside within our population as pertains to premature death. So I came away with a very optimistic sense of the future. And the presentations were given by individuals that you know, at the top of their games. Just remarkable. Carol Dahl started off and Carol, Dr. Dahl has a, she's from the Lemelson foundation, but she has an extraordinary background in working at the Gates foundation, working at the nci, working as a senior researcher in the area of, of cancer research and now really working at this philanthropy that's involved with innovation and really trying to find less expensive ways of intervening for countries around the world that are developing, that don't have large resource budgets. And she talked about work going on at Malawi as it pertains to one of the major problems they have, which is premature birth. Something like 25% of the birds there are premature and they don't have high tech availability obviously for these, these premature infants. So there's a huge high infant mortality. And talking about high school students and college students that were able to design programs to actually deliver a technology at dollars a day versus thousands of dollars a day to allow these children's lung function to be developed so they could be on their own and prevent early stage mortality. So it was very, very inspiring. You know, on the second day we had Roger Perlmutter do the opening kind of thematic address. He's presently the chief medical office chief science officer actually at Merck. And he was talking about the extraordinary breakthrough in immuno oncology and how the understanding of the immune system at a different level is revolutionizing cancer therapy. And he was talking about both the positives and the questions and some of the negatives in and what are the concerns that they have for these new PD1 checkpoint inhibiting drugs and how they are revolutionizing specific types of cancer that have been considered pretty much untreatable, like stage three, stage four melanoma, and making it a treatable disease. So I think that what we're starting to recognize and witness is a tremendous intersection between the genomic revolution with patient centered assessment, with new research methods, with ability for people to be more well informed about these therapies through social media, with big data analysis, and with what I would call a more humanistic and compassionate view of research as it pertains to getting it at a cost level and a level of delivery that can be accessible to more people. Yes, there's lots of things yet to be done. Yes, we're just first on the front edge of this new revolution. But I think that the optimism is there and it's something that we're going to be speaking about extensively when we start bringing this into the personalized lifestyle healthcare arena and how individuals personalizing their life in a precision way can prevent diseases, reduce human suffering, improve their function, and live out to the full limits of their genetic potential. So it's an exciting time to be part of the personalized Lifestyle Medicine Initiative and to be part of this group of collaborative individuals across disciplines that are really addressing the problems of our age.
