Most biomedical research is focused on disease and specific treatments for illness, rather than on understanding what it means to be healthy. Now researchers at Stanford, in collaboration with Duke University and Google [x], are planning a comprehensive initiative to understand the molecular markers that are key to health and the changes in those biomarkers that may lead to disease. The project was featured in a Wall Street Journal article today.
The study is at the very early stages, with researchers planning to enroll 175 healthy participants in a pilot trial later this year. The participants will undergo a physical exam and provide samples of blood, saliva and other body fluids that can be examined using new molecular testing tools, such as genome sequencing. The pilot study will help the researchers design and conduct a much larger trial in the future.
“We continue as a global community to think about health primarily only after becoming ill,” Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, professor and chair of radiology, told me. “To understand health and illness effectively, we have to have a better understanding of what ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ really means at the biochemical level."
“The study being planned will allow us to better understand the variation of many biomarkers in the normal population and what parameters are predictive of illness and may eventually change as a given individual transitions from a healthy to a diseased state. This will be a critical study that will likely help the field of health care for decades to come,” said Gambhir, who also directs the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection.
The researchers hope the work will provide insights on a variety of medical conditions, such as cancer and heart disease, and point to new methods for early detection of illness. Their studies will focus on the genetic basis of disease, as well as the complex interplay between genes and environment.
These kinds of studies haven’t been done before because of the cost and complexity of molecular measurement tools, the scientists say. However, the cost of some technologies, such as DNA sequencing, has been steadily declining, while some new tools and new ways of analyzing large quantities of data have just recently become available. So a first step in the study is to determine how best to use these technologies and determine what questions need to explored on a larger scale.
The work is sponsored by Google [x] and will be led by Andrew Conrad, PhD, a cell biologist and project manager at the company.
