The AI Revolution in Personalized Health Care, with Nathan Price, Chief Scientific Officer
Too often as a society, we wait until it is much too late to deal with disease, reacting only after serious symptoms arise.
I’m Dr. Nathan Price, and as Chief Scientific Officer at Thorne, I believe we can do much better. I believe it’s vital that we take a more proactive approach to health care, an approach that emphasizes extending our health spans for as long as possible.
At Thorne, our artificial intelligence (AI) platform — Thorne Health Intelligence — is helping us achieve this objective, to redraw the boundaries of health and wellness, and to realize what it means to live healthier longer.
Thorne Health Intelligence brings together data gathered through advanced testing — like our Microbiome, Biological Age, and Advanced and Essential blood panel tests — and interprets these signals using systems biology models of complex physiology and machine learning for pattern analysis. These “multi-omic” data enable an approach to biological analysis in which the data sets of multiple “omes” — genomes, proteomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, metabolomes, and microbiomes — are used to study life.
The objective is to deal with much of the inherent biological complexity via AI-enabled platforms to arrive at simple and actionable recommendations for what is most likely to improve each individual’s health and wellness.
Simply put, Thorne Health Intelligence helps us take what we have learned from science and translate it out to society to drive the future of personalized health and wellness. Our AI program helps us answer questions about how to support each individual’s health. Questions like, “What do my unique biomarkers indicate?” and “What diet or lifestyle changes might best suit me as a unique individual?”
AI is moving incredibly quickly right now, and it will continue to impact our lives in many ways, only the very beginnings of which are now visible. AI is expected to be at the heart of everything we do at Thorne as we strive to deliver ever deeper insights to our customers and business partners. Indeed, the complexity of biology means that we ultimately need AI to fully accelerate our abilities to enhance health as we enter the period of greatest advancement ever in optimizing health and remaking our medical system.
We call this proactive and preventive approach to health care “scientific wellness,” which is centered on two complementary objectives. The first is to provide individuals with the greatest chance they have to live healthier longer through personalized insights fueled by AI. Understanding what that next step is in someone’s health journey and intervening early enough for health problems to still be fully reversible, and in ways that don’t destroy other biological systems (like you see in late-stage disease treatments like chemotherapy), are essential goals.
The second is to engage in scientific wellness for those who consent to let their anonymous data be used for discovery to create a precious resource of dense, longitudinal health data that has the potential to revolutionize prevention and extend health span for humanity. Without this kind of data — starting from health and moving into the earliest stages of disease — humanity will never be able to build the kind of health care we deserve, one that will enable us to live reliably long and healthy lives.
When data that has been de-identified — to protect individual privacy — are collected and systematically analyzed, it gives us something that humanity has never had before: the basis on which to apply AI to understand the early warning signs for the major human diseases so we can predict and prevent them.
When I think of Thorne, I think “personalized, scientific wellness.” We achieve this through in-depth testing, AI-powered health insights, and high-quality nutritional supplements that help everyone have a healthy life journey. Driving the future of personalized health is at the core of our mission at Thorne and is the focal point of my career.
Building a career in scientific wellness
I got my start earning a PhD in bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego, which put me on the path to working on personalized medicine and scientific wellness. Initially, my work was building computational models of biochemistry, answering questions like, “How does your body convert the food you eat into energy and into yourself?” I studied with Professor Bernhard Palsson, the world’s leading expert on modeling metabolism at what we call the “genome-scale.” These were heady times because the human genome had just been sequenced, and it was possible for the first time to build comprehensive maps of biochemistry with a catalog of how many enzyme-encoding genes there actually are.
During graduate school, I saw for the first time I could contribute in some small way to the sum total of human knowledge — I published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers from my thesis work. Based on my work, I accepted a faculty position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, but deferred my start date for two years to pursue a post-doctorate degree with Dr. Lee Hood, a pioneer of systems biology, a recipient of a National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama, and the inventor of several scientific instruments, including the first automated DNA sequencer that made the Human Genome Project possible.
Afterward, I moved to my position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, primarily in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Carl Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. My lab was focused on systems biology, and I became engaged in a broad range of applications, including not only personalized medicine but also synthetic biology and engineering microorganisms for energy sustainability projects. Enabled by part of a 100 million dollar grant from the Government of Luxembourg, I accepted a job offer from Dr. Hood to move to the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB) as an Associate Professor, with a lab of more than 25 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in 2011. At ISB, I could focus my effort into my main interests, systems medicine, and ultimately scientific wellness.
Dr. Hood and I got together in 2013 and led a project we called the Pioneer 100 Wellness Project, in which we looked for individuals who wanted to go through a data-intensive journey of understanding health and wellness. Over the next several years, we ended up pulling together the largest multi-omic dataset that had ever been collected to study wellness and early-disease transitions, mapping out what happens before disease starts and publishing our findings in several papers in scientific journals. That is how I became interested in what can be done to stop disease, to optimize wellness, and to explore ways in which science and technology can drive better outcomes so we can take more control of our health.
In 2020, Thorne’s CEO, Paul Jacobson, reached out to me with the prospect of taking what I had learned and built in the science realm, to work with him to build this into a scalable enterprise that could bring the benefits of scientific wellness to millions of people. I became convinced (and still believe) that Thorne is the avenue that can best bring about what I view as an essential transformation needed in health care — from a disease-centric focus to a wellness-centric focus aimed at achieving enhanced health span for all.
To read more about the pursuit of scientific wellness, look for my new book, The Age of Scientific Wellness, which I co-wrote with Dr. Lee Hood. In the book, we explore how our society is on the cusp of an exponential leap in medicine. This new approach to precision health focuses on how we can use data and science to drive healthy aging and optimize wellness.
Today, relatively few patients have access to this new approach to health care. To make this approach accessible, The Age of Scientific Wellness shares actionable insights to help readers chart a course to a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life.
The Age of Scientific Wellness is published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press and is available wherever books are sold.
