Danny Hillis Discusses Proteomics And Personalized Medicine

Image Souce: Wired

 Personalized Medicine

Drawing on his own extensive experience in systems engineering and  designing complex, data-intensive processes, Danny Hillis recognized the short-comings of proteomics were not necessarily the individual components but the highly complicated, highly integrated process itself.

Danny Hillis is an American inventor, scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT.

Hillis is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies, Applied Proteomics, and author of The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.

When Metaweb was acquired by Google in 2010, the technology became the basis of Google’s Knowledge Graph.

During his recent lecture at Singularity University, Hillis explained how scientific medicine is beginning to revert back to more ancient, ayurvedic lessons about healthcare. The approach is to treat the body as a system, where balance is the foundation for good health and disease and sickness are the externalities of imbalance.

Hillis, along with Applied Proteomics co-founder, Dr. David Agus have focused the development of personalized medicine around measuring proteins and using computer science to diagnose and treat disease.    Hillis and Agus argue for the adoption of a systemic view—a way of honoring our bodies as complex, whole systems.  Agus' book The End of Illness, describes the outlook for personalized medicine more deeply.

With advancements in proteomics and computing Hillis suggests we can begin creating models of what a healthy bodily state looks like. In the same way we might use environmental models to analyze the global climate, we can isolate specific variables that can inform the larger picture. As the data piles up, preventative medicine will become a quantitative endeavour. Hillis believes the doctors visit of the future will be a simple blood test that measures proteins, lipids and some other key signals, which can then be plugged into a systematic database to help us treat diseases long before any symptoms arise.

It is a huge upgrade in efficiency, one that could save millions of lives and alleviate the indebted healthcare system in the process. —




SOURCE  Singularity University

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square