Human Longevity Promises a Hundred Years of Scientific Advancement in a Decade

 Life Extension  

Scientific advances are going to really accelerate according to Human Longevity founder Craig J. Venter and the company's CMO, Brad Perkins. They both promise to bring about a hundred years worth of progress in the next 10 years, and a revolution in medicine.

Using a "supercharged" approach to human genome research could see as many health breakthroughs made in the next decade as in the previous century, say key players in the medical start-up Human Longevity Inc.

“It’s going to be an exciting ride in the next 10 years,” Craig J. Venter, co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. said at the recent AHA Forum. Because technology has changed so dramatically since the genome was first mapped, he and other scientists now have previously unavailable machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computational tools to do the kind of experiments and analysis they first imagined all those years ago.

“I think there’s going to be more breakthroughs in the next decade than in the past 100 years,” he added.

Brad Perkins, chief medical offer at Human Longevity Inc, speaking at WIRED Health 2015 mirrored these statements.

Perkins says the opportunity for humanity—and Human Longevity—is the result of the convergence of four trends: the reduction in the cost of genome sequencing (from $100m per genome in 2000, to just over $1,000 in 2014), the vast improvement in computational power, the development of large-scale machine learning techniques and the wider movement of health care systems towards ‘value-based’ models. Together these trends are making it easier than ever to analyse human genomes at scale.

The company's CMO, Perkins heads up all clinical and therapeutic work at Human Longevity Inc. Previously he was an executive vice president at Vanguard Health Systems, and prior to that worked at the US Center for Disease Control, where he led the 2001 investigation into anthrax attacks. Now at Human Longevity, he believes the methods used to analyse diseases in the previous century can now be applied to the root causes of human aging.

Based in San Diego, Human Longevity is building up systems that use genome data and analytics to develop new ways to fight age-related diseases.

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The stealthy Human Longevity business plan is actually very simple, Perkins quipped: the company wants to take large amounts of genome data, subject it to machine learning and analytics, and "radically, disruptively" produce new models for medical care.

"Our focus is not being a fee for service sequencing operation," Perkins says. It is to "fully understand and fully interpret all the meaning in the human genome". To do that Human Longevity Inc is building machine learning systems which can act as a ‘Google Translate’ for genomics, taking in genetic code and spitting out insights.

Fittingly, they’ve hired as their chief data scientist Franz Och, who was formerly at Google working, among other things… on Google Translate. "To translate the language of biology in the form of sequence data into the language of health and disease, into the form of clinical phenotypes" is the aim, said Perkins.

"As genomics begins the process of revolutionizing human health and the practice of medicine, and opens the door to the next steps… of regenerative medicine."

The company will work to, "To define and continuously evolve what we consider to be a 21st digital description of the full human phenotype."

Human Longevity Inc will be analyzing the whole genome sequence—all 3.2 billon base pairs, compared to much lower numbers analysed by existing, mainstream DNA research companies such as 23andMe.

Collecting and analyzing all that data will require the world’s largest sequencing facility, which Human Longevity Inc operates, and Perkins estimates is currently able to sequence 35,000 human genomes per year.

That amount will almost triple to around 100,000 genomes per year by the end of 2015 and target is one million genomes per year by 2020. "I’d like to see that number higher," Perkins says.

The result of this work will be revolutionary according to Venter and Perkins. "I’m encouraged that we’re on the verge of having lots more grandfathers and grandmothers at the special events of all of our lives," Perkins says. "As genomics begins the process of revolutionizing human health and the practice of medicine, and opens the door to the next steps… of regenerative medicine. It’s going to be an extraordinarily exciting ride."

SOURCES  Medical Daily and WIRED

By 33rd Square

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