A Doctor’s Vision of the Future of Medicine

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P4 medicine will have a big impact on many industries, including pharmaceuticals, food and insurance, as well as health care. The interesting question is whether preexisting businesses and entrenched bureaucracies will be able to respond to these winds of change, or whether a host of new companies will emerge to replace them—focused precisely on these new opportunities.

Research will also have to change. Because most important diseases such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity and Alzheimer's are so complex, the traditional approaches to studying them have had only marginal results. Powerful new systems approaches, individual measurements and computational technologies will transform our ability to deal with complexity and fashion new drugs and approaches for therapy and prevention.

Medical education will also need to be transformed. Although today's medical students will be practicing P4 medicine within the next five to 20 years, their training is still focused on a classification of disease based on observation of relatively few measurements of health parameters. Tomorrow's physicians will need to be familiar with the complexity of the human biological system as never before, and they'll have to be handy with computer-based tools. Physicians will need to deal with patients who have an enormous amount of information at their disposal. And doctors will need to deal with maintaining wellness more than with disease.

The digitization of medicine—that is, our ability to extract and store disease-relevant information from DNA and molecules in the blood of each individual—together with the revolutionary changes in diagnosis, therapy and prevention will allow those of us in the developed world to export P4 medicine to the developing world and thus transform the quality of its health care. The new P4 medicine will eventually lead to a universal democratization of health care, bringing to billions the fundamental right of health, unimaginable even a few years ago.

Hood invented the genome sequencing technology that led to the decoding of the human genome in 2001. He is a pioneer of systems biology and medicine and founder of the Institute for System Biology in Seattle, Washington.

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Posted By: TruthForward @ 08/01/2009 10:13:58 PM

Technology is an advantage that the U.S. has over other countries. We continually grow technologically. The market (or individuals) responds to needs, or respond to profit potential.

When a third of the country elect to have government health insurance, there would be potential for anyone to open a MRI clinic, Asthma clinic, genetic diagnostic clinics, etc. if there is a demand. All they would have to do is hire an expert and get funding from SBA, banks, or investors. Then they would send the billing to the government (capitalism works).

I wonder why other countries are not so responsive to consumer demand; to solve problems.
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Posted By: Greg the Third @ 07/25/2009 2:24:02 PM

Excellent article. This will be the next revolution in healthcare akin to how antibiotics and infection control brought modern medicine out out of the dark ages in the 1930s and how rapid production of effective medicines by pharmaceutical manufacturers has sustained it since. Unfortunately it may take longer than 10 years for this to be realized. I was thinking more like 30. Of course this pleasant and cost effective reality can happen sooner if the federal government invests resources appropriately for this kind of technology and applications of it can be developed sooner. considering the healtcare debate now going on, this type of change to the system has the potential to lower health care costs enormously once these panels and assays are minaturized.
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Posted By: acompeau @ 07/12/2009 6:11:31 PM

It's all about preventive medicine. Our doctor's treat diseases not patients. If we lived healthier, we'd be healthiier, but most doctors aren't trained that way.

The advances in medicine have been amazing, but if no one can afford them...they don't really matter. My father who suffers from night blindness recently bought these new kind of contact lenses from this company called RanchCorp. They allow him to see at night. He could actually drive without his headlights on...but then other people wouldn't be able to see him, so he doesn't. They work like night vision goggles, but without the odd bright green color. They're pretty astounding. But they're very expensive. Insurance doesn't cover them. We can create technologies that allow people to see in the dark, but we can't keep people from dying from pneumonia...