THE NEW SCIENCE OF WELLNESS AND MEDICAL CARE, Part 1
PHENOMICS MEDICINE
Quality health care is not a privilege, but a human right.
Every one of us is genetically different with our own unique biology. That is why a one-size-fits-all solution is not always successful in medical care. Therefore, personalized medical care must become the gold standard in the future for medical care.
Today’s health care in the U.S. is being dominated by awfully expensive Corporate Medical Care, with its multiple insurers, numerous large hospital chains, biotech companies and big pharma. This arrangement to treat patients in the hospital with multiple medications and interventions, ICU care is very profitable for corporate medical care. They are not interested in doing research and offering preventative medical care, because there is not as much profit in preventative medical care.
However, the trend in scientific medicine, with generous financial contribution by tech billionaires is shifting towards better, and safer preventative medicine and personalized medical care. This is where the phenomics medicine, the new science and technology to help predict and prevent diseases, comes in.
What is the phenome and phenomics medicine? This is a new concept for me as well. As I see it from my search, readings and understanding - phenome is a scientific wellness program that focuses on wellness and try to spot the earliest signs of disease by checking a person’s genetic makeup and certain biomarkers in their blood, urine and bodily secretions. If any positive finding present, try to intervene to stop the disease or, diagnose the disease in its earliest and curable phase.
Then, the Phenome is just like phenotype, which is a set of individual’s biological, physical and intellectual traits. It tries to detect the complete set of phenotypes, in in any individual’s genetic makeup and biological reactions, due to his/her lifestyles and various environmental factors.
In short, the foundation of phenome and phenomics medicine is to check and obtain the entire DNA sequencing (genome) of an individual, together with thousands of proteins biomarkers, and metabolites which are small chemical by product of cellular metabolism, and if any abnormality found, taking appropriate measures could prevented the disease from occurring. Because abnormalities in biochemical activities of cells occur long before any impending diseases.
For better understanding, let’s give a case example. Let us assume that a person’s DNA sequencing shows that she has inherited a gene that carries a tendency and makes her vulnerable to develop breast cancer. What do we do in this situation? Besides giving her an option of a prophylactic mastectomy, she could also be told that this is only a tendency to develop breast cancer. There are many secondary factors in life that predispose a person to cancer such as lifestyle bad habits (smoking, drinking, substance abuse, overeating), wrong diet and nutrition, obesity, sedentary living, immune-compromised status or dysbiosis in gut microbiome population. Integrating all these factors together and taking personalized corrective measures and with close follow up measures, cancer development could be prevented and/or the disease could be diagnosed in an earliest and curable stage.
To summarize, the phenome is the complete set of phenotypes resulting from genetic variations in population. If complete phenome consists of all the genes in the human genome, and the biochemical and metabolic functions of all the cells, then phenome could be infinite and well above human capacity to analyze and to understand. I believe at this stage - advanced AI tools and machine learning must come to our rescue.
