After decades in which the global outlays for medical treatment have skyrocketed, costs for diagnosis and treatment will drop significantly in five to 10 years, as electronic chips use a drop of blood to identify proteins and the risk of diseases they represent, a leading biomedical researcher predicted.
Leroy Hood, a founder and the president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, told an overflow lecture at Jerusalem’s Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities that the coming “revolution” in biomedical science will “democratize medicine.”
He added that this new technology “will generate billions of data points on each individual, and everything will be much more inexpensive.”
He is one of nine of the world’s leading researchers in biomedicine — seven of them from abroad — who came to the Jerusalem academy for two days to mark its 50th anniversary.
The holder of 14 patents and the author of more than 650 peer-reviewed published journal articles, Hood is an advocate of “P4 medicine” — which he says will bring about a new era of predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory medicine.
His research has brought about the discovery of an automated gene sequencer and synthesizer, a protein sequencer and synthesizer, and an inkjet microarray technology that enables the sequencing of the human genome. Hood predicted that deciphering an individual genome will become cheap — about $500 each, allowing medical treatment to be tailored to the individual patient.
Rather than reacting to symptoms of disease, when successful treatment might be too late, Hood said, patients will go to their physicians for an annual checkup, have their genetic codes tested, and be told whether they are at high risk of getting a disease in the future and what can be done — by changing lifestyle or taking medications — to avoid it.
“We already have a chip that can identify 50 proteins in minutes. We want to do it to thousands,” he said.
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