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Welcome to BIOTECH NATION !!! With understandable interviews requiring no background in science, BTN attracts a wide global audience. From everyday people looking for hope in treatments in development, to bioentrepreneurs interested in the experience of their fellow travelers, to venture capitalists looking for possibilities in cutting-edge breakthroughs, to scientists simply interested in the work of others, BioTech Nation is the voice of human endeavor, driving science to new realities for everyone. These interviews are drawn directly from the public radio program, "Tech Nation", which also can be heard in numerous global radio and podcasting venues.
Today on Tech Nation, we hear from doctor Leroy Hood and doctor Nathan Price about the concept and promise of focusing on our wellness, all with the help of science. Doctor Hood developed the first technology to decode your DNA and is often called the father of systems biology. Doctor Price is the chief science officer of Thorne Health Tech and is a professor at the Institute For Systems Biology. They're here today with the age of scientific wellness, why the future of medicine is personalized, predictive, data rich, and in your hands. And now, doctor Leroy Hood and doctor Nathan Price.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, doctor Hood and doctor Price, welcome to Tech Nation.
Dr. Leroy Hood:Glad to be here. Wonderful to be here.
Dr. Nathan Price:Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Moira.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now people throw around the term artificial intelligence all the time. Many times, they can't explain it. So that's a black box. Tell us, you see AI as an imperative and you see it working for us in a number of ways. Can you give us a few examples specifically of what we mean by AI?
Dr. Moira Gunn:Is it machine learning? What is it? And why do we need AI versus just some simple analysis?
Dr. Nathan Price:Yeah. It's a great question. So you can split AI certainly into at least a couple of different groups. So, you know, weak and strong AI, for example. And so when we talk about AI proper, you're really talking about something that can approximate the way that we might think about a process.
Dr. Nathan Price:Right? And we've really had maybe the first style of that at scale through what we're seeing in these large language models, even those are still not to that, you know, extreme point because they don't yet understand, but they can approximate a lot of the logic that we use because of their ability to simulate language that we do. So that's a really interesting case. There's also a lot of things that are called AI, especially just marketing wise AI, that are really more simple analysis. And there are many things that we can do just by analysis, and, you know, we could get into, you know, a whole host of those.
Dr. Nathan Price:So the other thing to remember is that there are pieces that have been deployed that are quite simple that are already used in health care all the time that are around, knowledge based models. So these are like expert systems. These things have been shown in health care to make a big difference in terms of reducing, errors in hospital systems, and we talk about that in the book some, and you can deploy it. Now if we think about AI in terms of how it relates to scientific wellness going forward, it's act we're actually at an incredible period of time. So, if you think about these large language models, for example, the ability to do highly personalized recommendations to people in plain English is now very possible, totally doable in a way that even a year ago would have been almost unthinkable to do at this scale.
Dr. Nathan Price:And so, what really matters from our standpoint is that you take deep multi omic data, the genome phenom, right, know a lot about what's happening in your biology. There's another technology called digital twins, which we've worked on a lot, which can take a lot of that data and then make simulations about what that means for your health. And then you deliver personalized information out of that, especially delivered with these large language models, and you start to have an ability to mine what is possible to understand from your particular biology and give you recommendations that are incredibly specific and informed by more data than you could ever keep in your own mind or any physician could or anything like that. So the we're just entering, what I think is gonna be the era or we think is gonna be the era of just hyper personalization at a scale that we just couldn't even contemplate before. So it's it's it's an amazing time.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now this is a very personal book for both of you on a number of levels. Doctor Hood, I wanted to ask you about your wife, Valerie, and your son, Aaron, and for all of you and your family, the reality and the potential for Alzheimer's. Let's go there.
Dr. Leroy Hood:Well, my, wife was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2,005, and of course that came as an enormous shock to me. And actually that was an incentive for making Alzheimer's a major research effort, going forward. And as a caretaker, my wife, Valerie, went through, all of the stages that are actually classic. And she's still alive today, some 17 or 18 years later, although she can't speak, and and, she's been in hospice for the last couple of years, but, there is nothing that can be done for her at this point in time. One of these, it moved me in in 2 ways.
Dr. Leroy Hood:1 was to get involved in Alzheimer's and start thinking about research. And second, it was to think about my family, because, both my grandfather on my mother's side and several other members of Valerie's family had actually had Alzheimer's. So we did genetic analysis of the dominant genes for Alzheimer's in all of our family members, and it turned out, I have a son, Aaron, that has two copies of the gene most predisposing for Alzheimer's, and my daughter actually, Marquis, had none. And in what I think has really happened in Alzheimer's is there has come to be an enormous split and a deepening in understanding of what the pathophysiology of it is. So I can say from the pharma point of view, and from the national health point of view, mostly for the last 12 years, 14 years, 16 years, amyloid and tau, these are proteins in the brain, have been accused as the culprits of the disease, and they're much more likely to be an effect of the disease rather than a cause of the disease.
Dr. Leroy Hood:And it turns out that, that Nathan and I have actually created a digital twin with others for Alzheimer's, and it's led to some very deep insights into what Alzheimer's is. And fundamentally, we think it's basically a metabolic disease and is somewhat similar to diabetes. In fact, people are starting to call it type 2 diabetes. But one of the consequences is for metabolic diseases, you can have a real impact in them through appropriate diet and exercise and sleep and things like that. That is, there are things that ordinary people can do to prevent the disease.
Dr. Leroy Hood:And we have my son on a regimen that he's following very rigorously from all of those, and he's in his mid fifties now, and is still running ultra marathons and doing incredible he he goes elk and deer hunting, and so he he's extremely careful about his diet. He runs incredible distances up the mountains of Juneau, Alaska, every day. So the outcome is, I think there are real preventive measures one can think about starting for people that you know have a predisposition for this disease. And one of the things Nathan and I would really like to do with Alzheimer's is get a large number of people who are at risk for the disease, but have not yet transferred. We have to prove that.
Dr. Leroy Hood:And then follow them to see what the biomarkers are that could give us warning of this disease, perhaps up to 15 years before you actually get the clinical diagnosis. So again, the theme of cancer and the theme of Alzheimer's is early prevention is going to be the key to controlling and ultimately eliminating these diseases, we hope.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now let's talk about the reality of our times. You wrote a section on the cost of science denialism and truth decay. You both must have something to say about this.
Dr. Leroy Hood:Well, what I would say about that chapter that was in the epilogue, The editor and many others argued that it didn't belong in the book, and the reason for that is we were making an appeal and talking about in the last chapter just how we could move this whole initiative of scientific wellness and and prevention forward. And they argued that having something that dealt with demagogues and truth decay and Trump and things like that would be a distraction at the end of the book. I mean, it was positive and it said, in the sense, it said the real solution to truth decay is education at the younger levels. It's absolutely critical. Very hard to educate adults.
Dr. Leroy Hood:I mean, the red and the blue are pretty firmly differentiated along their their various lines. But in I I feel very strongly about that, and I'm we're actually gonna probably try and write that up for another journal.
Dr. Nathan Price:Yeah. And I'll just add to that as well. So it is such a huge issue, you know, of our times that you know, how to deal with truth versus fiction. And it's becoming increasingly hard in some ways because of the advance of AI. Right?
Dr. Nathan Price:Because we can do deep fakes. You can have anyone say anything, and it sounds like their voice. It looks like their face. It looks you know, there are all these issues that are arising about how do we tell, you know, what's what's real and what's not and so forth. Those are big topics that we can only have a tiny impact on, but, you know, but that's my tooth net.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You do what we can. We can
Dr. Nathan Price:do what we can. Yes. Exactly.
Dr. Leroy Hood:I think it is really a critical issue. I agree a 100%. And I think the conclusion that we have to reach out to is, K through 12 education, and that is where it has to be dealt with if we're going to make a difference. And we've actually done a whole series of things along those lines that I think has been remarkably effective. By we, I mean the Institute For Systems Biology, and it's, and and in fact, the educational system is named after my wife.
Dr. Leroy Hood:It's the Valerie Logan Educational Center at, ISB.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now let's get back to every individual. We have listeners that are in their twenties. We have listeners in their nineties. We have centenarians. We have people of all ages, all genders who listen to this show.
Dr. Moira Gunn:What should each of us, independent of our age or anything else, what should each of us be doing? What could we do for ourselves, potentially for our families?
Dr. Leroy Hood:You wanna start, Nathan?
Dr. Nathan Price:Yeah. I'll I'll start with that. So I there there's many things you can do, and I'll just give I'll give a couple of examples. So one is, you know, we've talked about this triumvirate of data that is very important, your genome, and your phenome, but it's broken down especially to the genome, blood measures, and your microbiome. So microbiome is a really interesting area where everything that you ingest into your body, whether it's food, a supplement, a drug, whatever it is, everything has to pass through this envelope around you first.
Dr. Nathan Price:So your microbiome will change aspects of all of those things, and that has become possible to observe really just for the first time over the last, few years. So one of the really interesting things then is that you can go you can get a microbiome test done, and you can learn all kinds of things about, you know, how your body breaks how your microbiome is breaking down food. Is it making your stomach more basic than it should be and interfering with your digestion? Are you having too much leakage through you know, out into your gut, from comments that you don't wanna see there, etcetera, etcetera? So, you know, that's something, you know, we have a gut health test at at Thorn that we've done.
Dr. Nathan Price:And one of the things that we really focus on a lot in terms of translation is can you make this as easy as possible for people to do? So if you think about the traditional way that to do a a microbiome test, and I don't know what fraction of your your listeners may have done this or not, but the the the traditional way is you have to poop in a bucket or on a piece of paper. You have to get a little chill
Dr. Moira Gunn:like, weird. How's he gonna do this? How's he gonna do it? That's very interesting. That all passed.
Dr. Moira Gunn:That'll go out. You know? The FCC is just fine.
Dr. Nathan Price:Alright. We'll stay as as, as non graphic as possible. But you you have to take a little shovel. You have to scoop up a little bit, put it in a vial, close it. Some of the tests require freezing, and I don't know what your listeners, keep in their fridge, but I I I keep food there, so it's you don't have the stuff
Dr. Moira Gunn:No thanks.
Dr. Nathan Price:A separate sample. So this was a problem. Right? So one of the things that we did at Thorne was sit around and think, what was the easiest way that we could make this possible for people so that they could get access to that kind of information, in an easier way? So we invent we invented something called the microbiome wipe, which is what it sounds like.
Dr. Nathan Price:It's basically special toilet paper. It's made out of a polymer, so you can wipe like you do every day. You can throw that in a vial and close it. You shake it, dissolves away in 10 seconds, and then you push a button, it releases a salt solution, preserves the DNA. We show that we could get just as high quality DNA this way.
Dr. Nathan Price:We published it in the peer reviewed literature in Frontiers in Immunology last year, and so you can you can preserve it. So what that does is make it as easy to get a microbiome information as it is to use toilet paper. And so one of the things that we're very focused on is making it as easy as possible for people to do this. We've got another device, that is going through, FDA approvals right now. It's already approved for use with a supervised draw, called the 1 draw, and this is a painless at home a sent virtually painless.
Dr. Nathan Price:I'm not allowed to say painless, but on a scale of 10, people rated it 0 to a 1, so I'll correct that. But it's virtually painless. At home, you could capture blood, and this lets you do you could make thousands of measurements on this on the back end if you use metabolomics or proteomics or these things that you can do from pretty small blood volumes. So there's all of of that you can do. And and then the the only other thing I'll add to that, just from very recent, analysis that we've done.
Dr. Nathan Price:So we mentioned these digital twins, that we've been doing for brain health, and we will have a brain health test, you know, launching by the end of this year from Thorn. But one of the things that we are doing is you can actually simulate cognition over the course of life with different interventions of things that you can do from a prevention standpoint. Like, once people are into dementia and your neurons have died, no one knows how to put that back together. But prevention is is possible. Prevention is doable.
Dr. Nathan Price:And one of the things that's so fascinating is that because we can simulate 10,000,000 digital twins and we can do it over and over again, we can simulate
Dr. Moira Gunn:That's that's just digital representations of yourself.
Dr. Nathan Price:Digital representations of yourself. So we can look at all these counterfactuals. We can simulate what happens. And what happens is that when we take each independent component 1 by 1, you show a very small effect on lifetime dementia risk. But as you start doing them in combinations, there's a threshold that you go over and you and it's not additive.
Dr. Nathan Price:You don't get what intervention a plus b plus c plus d, dude. You get some multiple that's higher than all of them. And so we're just diving into that, but it's a and I think people are aware of this. So when you isolate one variable at a time and in medicine, we always do that because it leads to a nice clean trial. Right?
Dr. Nathan Price:There's reasons that we do it. But if you're dealing with an issue, what you really wanna do is to compound as many of these individual things as possible. Because if you only handle one problem, but you still have these other set of problems, it doesn't help you that much because you haven't solved the whole problem. This is the whole point of systems biology. Right?
Dr. Nathan Price:Lee is widely considered the father of systems biology. Of course, we worked for a decade together at Institute For Systems Biology, more than that. And so when you look at these things from a systems perspective, as you solve, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 once you kind of hit all the things that matter, you see these jumps in terms of a benefit. And I think a lot of people will know that in their own life when they have a problem they're trying to solve. If you try one thing, it kinda works or it doesn't work.
Dr. Nathan Price:But when you just say, hey. Look. I'm gonna throw the kitchen sink at it. I have to change this aspect. You see it go.
Dr. Nathan Price:And so that's one of the things that I think is is really fascinating, and we're entering this world to where you can just do that now with so much more data around your genome, your microbiome, and your blood measures, and it's it just is very empowering that way.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Hey. Who doesn't like 2 +2 equals 5?
Dr. Nathan Price:Exactly. Exactly. I'm all
Dr. Moira Gunn:over it. Yeah. I'm all over it. Doctor Hood, with Alzheimer's in your family, having detected as well, the the tendency in your son, Aaron, and none in your daughter, Marquis, What do you recommend to people who have this experience in their family that they know of?
Dr. Leroy Hood:Well, my recommendation is, first of all, to read our book because it talks in very specific ways about some of the actions that can be taken, that will include things like optimizing your exercise, your diet, making sure your sleep is sufficient and appropriate in quality. Frankly, I think stress is an enormous dimension that we have to worry about as well. And I think what's interesting about the data driven health that we've talked about is that provides explicit ways that you can optimize for the individual, each of those general health kinds of things. But to give you some concrete examples, I've, for my entire life, been a fanatic about exercise and doing push ups and sit ups and balance and, and strength kind of exercises. And I think those have made an enormous difference.
Dr. Leroy Hood:And indeed, from the Ayurvedale population, because we had people that ranged in age from 21 to 90 plus, we were able to determine an algorithm that actually told you about your biological age, that is the age your body says you are, as opposed to the age your birthday says you are. And the, what's obvious is the lower your biological age is with regard to chronologic age, the healthier you're aging. And what is really nice about this metric is we assess the population of people for 4 years in the Aireville wellness program, and women lost about a year and a half of biological age per year in the program. And in that program, Nathan lost about 10 years of biological age, which was really remarkable.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You must have really been a slug before you got in that program, Nathan. That's what I my prediction That is exact hypothesis.
Dr. Nathan Price:That is exactly the right, approach. Yes. Exactly.
Dr. Leroy Hood:But but the the important thing is this is a beautiful metric for how you're aging and for wellness because we went and looked at a whole array of diseases, and individuals with all these diseases all had biological ages higher than their chronological age. Diabetes, it was 6 years greater. So and one of the things I'll say is Thorne has adopted this biological test now, and it's available. So if your customers want it, you can see, and in an instance, you really get a sense of how healthy you are. What's your biologic relative to your chronologic age?
Dr. Leroy Hood:So, with me, it was 15 years difference. So all that exercise and those things have really made a difference. But I think reading and keeping up with what's going on, and in the book we discuss beautifully all sorts of examples of things you can use that almost certainly will improve your biological age, which has the ability to assess major organs like the liver and the kidney and the hematopoietic system and the immune system and so forth. And what's nice about the way we do that measurement is it gives you advice on how you can decrease your biological age, that is slow your aging, both in a global sense and for your various organs and everything. So there are things people could do immediately.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, gentlemen, this has been terrific. Please know you're always welcome on Tech Nation. Thank you for coming.
Dr. Nathan Price:Thanks so much, Moira. It's our pleasure. Yeah. Thanks, Moira. Great to be with you.
Dr. Moira Gunn:My guests today are doctor Leroy Hood and doctor Nathan Price. Their book is The Age of Scientific Wellness, Why the Future of Medicine is Personalized, Predictive, Data Rich, and in Your Hands. It's published by the Bell Net Press of Harvard University Press. This podcast continues our interview with doctor Leroy Hood and doctor Nathan Price. If you haven't listened to part 1, it may be found at biotechnology.com or your favorite podcaster.