Google Attempting To Map The Human Body

 Medicine  

Google’s newest health-related project aims to create a crowd-sourced data-set of human health by collecting anonymous genetic and molecular information from users.

I n a new project called Baseline Study, Google intends to map the human body. The project will collect anonymous genetic and molecular information from 175 volunteers to start, leading to an expanded group of thousands more.  The company intends to create what the company hopes will be the fullest picture of what a healthy human being should be.

The early-stage project is run by Andrew Conrad, a 50-year-old molecular biologist who pioneered cheap, high-volume tests for HIV in blood-plasma donations.

"We are just asking the question: If we really wanted to be proactive, what would we need to know? You need to know what the fixed, well-running thing should look like."

Dr. Conrad joined Google X, last year, and he has built a team of about 70-to-100 experts from fields including physiology, biochemistry, optics, imaging and molecular biology.

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While there are other mass medical and genomics studies being conducted around the world, Baseline intends to gather a much larger and broader set of new data.  Specifically, the intent is to find and utilize new biomarkers for disease and other health conditions. Combined with big data analysis techniques and machine learning expertise available at the company, the researchers hope to develop new techniques for detecting disease far earlier and push medicine more toward prevention rather than the treatment of illness.

For instance, the study may reveal a biomarker that helps some people break down fatty foods efficiently, helping them live a long time without high cholesterol and heart disease. Others may lack this trait and succumb to early heart attacks. Once Baseline has identified the biomarker, researchers could check if other people lack it and help them modify their behavior or develop a new treatment to help them break down fatty foods better, Conrad said.

"With any complex system, the notion has always been there to proactively address problems," Dr. Conrad tells the Wall Street Journal. "That's not revolutionary. We are just asking the question: If we really wanted to be proactive, what would we need to know? You need to know what the fixed, well-running thing should look like."

Project Baseline won't be restricted to specific diseases; it will collect hundreds of different samples using a wide variety of new diagnostic tools, among them, Google's smart contact lens.

The researchers admit that the project is a giant leap into the unknown. That's because the human body is so complex and so little is known about the interplay between DNA, enzymes and proteins and how environmental factors like diet influence this.




SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

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