Biomedicine pioneer Leroy Hood says that artificial intelligence will play a key role in the future of healthcare by accelerating the progress of “scientific wellness,” an approach that he has championed for many years.
Hood, co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology, delves into this approach in his new book, “The Age of Scientific Wellness,” which he wrote with co-author Nathan Price, an ISB professor and chief scientific officer of Thorne HealthTech.
On this week’s GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Hood about the book, how AI is key to the future of medicine, and what people can do now to live a healthy life.
“AI will be the core foundation for the diagnosis and delivery of actionable possibilities for the information that comes from data-driven health in the future,” he said. “It will be able to take each individual and map out exactly how they should optimize their health and keep track of it.”
The book explores the notion that, at some point during life, every person makes a transition from wellness to nascent disease. It might not be something we see, feel, or can sense. But with the right kind of monitoring of the body’s biological systems, it may be a transition that we can measure and possibly even interfere with.
“Scientific wellness is predicated on the idea that each of us has a trajectory of health that we can follow across our lifetime,” Hood said. “We now have the ability, using a data-rich approach and new methods of AI, to actually assess the health trajectory and to optimize it for each individual.”
In the book, Hood recounts the trailblazing science that opened the door to a more data-centric and personalized approach to wellness.
In the 1980’s, while he was a Caltech professor, Hood’s team developed automated methods for sequencing DNA — technology that helped lead to the Human Genome Project. Hood went on to garner the prestigious Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the National Medal of Science.
Hood also coined the term “P4 medicine” — the idea that healthcare should be “predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory.”
In 2015, Hood co-founded Arivale, a startup based on P4 medicine that took stock of the body’s systems at the genetic, molecular, and microbial level. The company offered genome sequencing services, monitored metabolites in the blood, and assessed the composition of the bacteria in the gut, among other offerings.
Arivale folded in 2019. But data from its customers suggested that the approach had a beneficial effect on health. Hood himself found that he had abnormally low vitamin D levels in his blood, which he traced to variants in specific genes. And he remedied the deficiency with extra high doses of a Vitamin D supplement, he told GeekWire.
Hood’s new effort, “Phenome Health,” aims to build a “digital image” of an individual’s health and how it changes in response to lifestyle and environmental changes. The nonprofit’s first goal, “The Human Phenome Initiative,” aims to collect data on one million Americans including on blood molecules, the gut microbiome and digital health measurements.
‘I want to see people move into their 90s excited, creative and functional.’
— Leroy Hood
The endeavor will focus on four key chronic disease areas: diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. “The key thing is to get these early diagnostics years before clinical manifestation, and reverse disease very, very early on,” said Hood.
Physicians don’t have the ability to interfere successfully to slow all nascent conditions. But the more data researchers collect, the more they will be able to understand signs of chronic disease and aging and develop and assess interventions, said Hood.
Some researchers say that Hood’s approach to medicine has not yet matured. But he is used to criticism. In his book he recounts that the field of systems biology was new when he launched the ISB, but it has since been embraced throughout the life sciences with advances in big data, AI, and computational techniques.
Hood is now 84 years old and an athlete who has kept fit his whole life. Measurements show that his “biological age” is 15 years younger, he said. He’s still going strong, and dropped a hint of a future endeavor in our conversation. “I hope to have an Arivale 2.0 within the next five years,” he said.
“I want to see people move into their 90s excited, creative, and functional,” said Hood. “Not retiring, but energetically doing whatever they wish, and having the energy to interact with people, which is really a key thing to successful aging.”
Read on for more highlights from our interview, edited for clarity and brevity.
How can the everyday person put into practice the approach you are advocating?
Hood: In this book, we give the typical person a whole series of recommendations about doing that. But it starts with just the classic things that we do and think about for wellness. So, a proper diet, less red meat, more vegetables and fiber, those kinds of things. I think the idea of exercise is incredibly important — a broad series of exercises, both aerobic and anaerobic, and doing it regularly. Also, getting the proper amount of sleep and really dealing with stress, one of the big dangers for aging of contemporary society.
On the other side, we offer a whole new menu with data driven health that includes actionable possibilities that come from your genome and from measurements of your phenome — blood analytes, the gut microbiome, digital health and such. The integration of these together leads to yet other actionable possibilities, as I showed with my own vitamin D example.
There’s been a rise recently in complementary and alternative medicine, driven partly by the need for patients to be seen as individuals. But there’s also a lot of what you call quackery. What should the consumer look out for?
The consumer always has to be very careful of who his medical providers are. I will say that in the naturopath area, there are a subset of people that are called functional medicine doctors that are superb. They’re real advocates of this kind of scientific wellness. But I think you do have to be careful because of the quacks. The other thing is that there are a lot of companies out there that promote wellness, and for most of them it’s a general blanket like exercise, diet, stress, sleep, that kind of thing.
In the book you talk about the potential for AI to change medicine. What do you think of ChatGPT-3 and GPT-4, the generative large language models that mimic human speech in response to prompts?
The key thing about ChatGPT is that if you want to use it for medicine, you have to educate the hyperscale AI device with the appropriate medical features. We plan to take a device and use only medical features to do the education, including all of PubMed. It will be exactly tuned to be able to take the complex data from each patient and talk about the actionable possibilities that this patient will require to bring them back toward normal. That’s the vision of how we, at Phenome Health, see using ChatGPT.
Even with proper training, do you think the GPT models will be accurate enough for medicine?
In the beginning, we’re going to have to check them all very carefully with humans. But increasingly, I think they will become accurate enough that we can back off on checking every single thing. There will be areas where we can edit them to make sure we know they’re absolutely accurate.
Some of the actionable possibilities you talk about are not yet realized. But I imagine that the more data you accumulate about health, the more you will understand how to interfere.
That is exactly correct. One of the biggest deficiencies in the Arivale program for scientific wellness was that it only concentrated on the body. And in this next program, we’ll also be concentrating on the brain and on the gut microbiome. And those are three pillars that are utterly critical, whose integration together is what makes the seamless operation of a human being. We think you need to exercise your brain just like you exercise your body and your heart, and there will be a lot of very explicit instructions, actionable possibilities for doing that.
There’s been a lot of talk about health and microbial composition in the gut and elsewhere in the body. What should people be paying attention to?
We showed that if you aged in a healthy way, your gut microbiome lost the core microbiome you had in your 20s and 30s. Every healthy person differentiated a unique microbiome, presumably in response to what their needs were in their 70s and 80s. The interesting idea is that we may be able to engineer your microbiome in the future to optimize the healthy aging process.
Right now though, the one thing you’re interested in is if your microbiome is diverse. If it’s diverse to a first approximation, that means you’re pretty healthy. The microbiome clearly reflects diet in all sorts of interesting ways. But learning what the actionable possibilities are is still a few years in the future.
What are some ways people can improve their brain health?
One of the most exciting types of measurement and intervention possibilities is our ability to carry out a digital analysis of cognitive features. We’re collaborating with Michael Merzenich at University of California, San Francisco, who started a company called Posit that developed digital brain measuring tools. And essentially, they have some 40 measurements they can use to assess 25 different cognitive features like reaction time, depth of field and memory.
Merzenich demonstrated that the brain is plastic, and it’s plastic all the way out into the 80s or 90s — though cognitive abilities rise to a maximum for normal people in the mid 30s and they gradually fade away thereafter. He took 1,000 individuals and showed that the majority of them could be assessed with these devices and that the lost cognitive features could be returned. It means that in your late 80s, as long as you haven’t lost neurons, your brain has a plasticity to return back to its youthful kind of vigor.
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