Jeffrey Bland, PhD recommends a Science article by Eric Schadt and Steven Friend titled “Clues from the Resilient.” He emphasizes that although genomic variants confer disease risk, most risk genes remain unexpressed for much of life because epigenetic mechanisms regulate which genes are read. Schadt’s approach is to study resilient individuals — people with genomic risk who remain healthy — to identify epigenetic and lifestyle factors (diet, exercise, environment, exposures) that suppress disease expression. Bland frames this as an empowering message: lifestyle choices and exposures are major levers of resilience, not passive genetic fate.
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Biomarkers that are going to individualize characteristics from the metabolome or the proteome or the genome of individuals. And that solution or healthcare issue will be personalization. And then this article, which just appeared this week in Science Magazine, is authored by a friend of mine, I'm very proud to say, Eric Schott, who is quite a remarkable guy. I don't use the word genius easily. I think there are a lot of very smart people in the world, but there are probably very few geniuses. Eric Schad is a genius, there's no question about it. So now if you go to the web, you'll find the Icon Institute of Translational Genomics, and it's run by Dr. Schott. And this is an article that he just authored, which I think is a very. With a good. Another remarkable guy by the name of Steven Friend, who is equally brilliant. And the title of this is Clues from the Resilient. Now, what is this all about? Let me tell you why I think this article is so darn important. So we know about all these genes that we think control our disease patterns. We have, oh, the risk to heart disease, the risk to cancer, the risk to diabetes, the risk to dementia, the wrist, arthritis in our HLA complement genome or whatever it might be. And so it gives us this concept, I said, that we gotta skirt around the edges of life because our number might be pulled and we don't even have a choice. However, as he points out in this article, for most all people throughout most of their life, these genes that might encode for a relative disease are not expressed. They're held in check by what we would call epigenetic factors, right? Epigenetic above the genome. Not everything in our book of life is being expressed. Think of what a mess we would be because every cell in our body has the message for every other cell at every other age. If all of that book of life was being expressed simultaneously, boy, we would be a total mess. So only selected portions of our book of life are being read. And what controls the reading of our book of life are a complex series of products that are called epigenetics, right? Things that regulate how genes ultimately express their message under different sets of circumstances. And that's what gives rise to our resilience. So his construct is, let us study not the diseases of risk, let us study what those resilience factors are in a person's genome that prevents those things from being expressed. So they've now compiling a huge database of individuals who, after genomic screening, have all sorts of risk genesis but they go through life never getting ill and then analyzing the other off target genes to see what's controlling the fact that they're not expressing those risk genes those genes of susceptibility and what do you think they find as the biggest controlling factors? Da da it's not the drugs that person took it's the life that they lead it's the information that their genes are receiving over the course of living their diet, their lifestyle, their exercise patterns, their air, water, their toxic exposures these are the big levers that actually control the epigenetics that modulate then how our gene in our book of life will be expressed so that's how you go from being a person at risk to a person resilient and the extraordinary thing about this the thing we're trying to teach our grandchildren is they're in control of these things right this is the most empowering concept you can imagine we're not victims we're advocates we just have to unleash our advocacy for good health now there's.
