Systems Medicine and Proactive P4 Medicine:
Transforming Healthcare through Wellness—A Personal View
Leroy Hood Institute of Systems Biology, Seattle, WA
ABSTRACT: Three converging opportunities—systems medicine, big/digital data (and its analytics) and patient-activated social networks—are leading to a proactive medicine that is predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory (P4). I will contrast P4 medicine with contemporary evidence-based medicine and discuss its societal implications for healthcare. P4 medicine has two central thrusts—quantifying wellness and demystifying disease.
Then I will discuss how we plan to introduce P4 medicine into the current healthcare system with a P4 pilot program—a longitudinal, high-dimensional data cloud study on each of 100,000 well patients for 20 years. We have already generated and analyzed the dynamical data clouds for a year on 107 well individuals for 10 months (this is termed the 100 Pioneers program). The preliminary results from these studies are striking and will be discussed in detail.
There are two directions that we are taking in the future with respect to scientific wellness. First, an academic effort pioneered by ISB on using the strategy of the 100 Pioneer project to study with academic and industrial partners both wellness and studying populations at risk for certain diseases to follow wellness to disease transitions for common diseases. This will provide new insights into the potential of the early reversal of disease. Second, we have recently started a scientific wellness company, Arivale, and I will talk about the future trajectory of this company—and the fact that it will initiate a whole new healthcare sector—scientific wellness—that I predict in a 10-15 year period will exceed in market cap the disease industry (or the current healthcare industry).