Leroy Hood wants to change the field of medicine from a reactive to a proactive one, making healthcare more effective, more personal, and cheaper. The basis of this transformation is treating biology and medicine as informational sciences - given huge amounts of data, how do we derive information? In his Big Thinkers talk on December 2, 2009, “Systems Biology, Systems Medicine, and Transformational Technologies”, Hood described the principles, challenges and benefits of taking an informational approach to his fields. The benefits stand to have a revolutionary impact on healthcare, and they are coming soon. As an example of his work, Hood detailed one study on prion disease in mice. He collected data over time on the proteins produced by diseased and non-diseased mice. Despite such data being inherently noisy, he was able to pinpoint the set of disease-related genes and the biological functions to which they relate. Because he found a causal ordering among disease-affected proteins, he was able to predict disease in mice before they showed any clinical signs. The potential impact of this kind of study for humans is enormous. Hood suggests it will be possible to develop a canonical set of human proteins where each protein is unique to some organ. As part of regular health checkups, doctors will draw a drop of blood and check each protein for abnormalities. For any abnormality found, it will be possible to trace that protein to the responsible organ and even determine the exact cause. This is the kind of innovation that will make medicine far more exact and far more proactive. Hood gave a number of other examples of innovations that allow for collections of huge data sets about patients (e.g., genome sequencing), and innovations that process data (e.g. ,protein chips). Ultimately, Hood’s goal is to enable P4 medicine. The “P”s are predictive (e.g. ,frequency and cheap blood checks to find problems early), personalized (e.g. ,maintain billions of data points for each patient), preventative (e.g., take a systems approach to developing vaccines), and participatory (e.g., doctors and patients must adapt to these new approaches). Hood summarized his talk by emphasizing that P4 medicine has the potential to greatly improve healthcare while also reversing the trend of rising healthcare costs. We must address the challenges of developing the necessary IT and dealing with the societal implications of collecting so much data about all patients. Nevertheless, Hood believes all future healthcare policy should be based on P4.

More information at:

http://www.labs.yahoo.com/Big_Thinkers