Dr. Don Brown is founder and CEO of LifeOmic.
LifeOmic
For Dr. Don Brown, accessible tech indicates additional accessible information.
Dr. Brown is founder and chief executive of LifeOmic, a digital overall health firm whose concentrate is on developing infrastructure and the underpinnings of overall health tech. LifeOmic describes itself on its site as becoming “laser-focused on driving the most revolutionary precision overall health technologies forward to resolve healthcare’s most complicated challenges.” Place just, that indicates producing complicated information sets additional accessible to individuals in the market such as providers, researchers, and enterprises. The massive image concept is apparent: additional accessible information for pros leads to much better, additional effective care for individuals in terms of the actual practice of medicine. Of course, much better and additional effective care is undoubtedly attractive to disabled individuals.
LifeOmic came into existence just after Dr. Brown committed a portion of the proceeds from the sale of a prior firm, a computer software firm known as Interactive Intelligence, in 2016. In an interview earlier this month by means of e mail, he explained the cause for LifeOmic was to “solve a dilemma vexing the healthcare program in common and cancer therapy in particular—the intense difficulty in working with the gigantic ‘omics’ information sets that had been displaying such tremendous guarantee.” (As Wikipedia explains, omics is the colloquial term in the scientific globe for “various disciplines in biology whose names finish in the suffix -omics, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, phenomics and transcriptomics.”)
“I began LifeOmic harboring the conceit that a modest firm could jump in and make a distinction in healthcare,” Dr. Brown stated of founding the firm.
When asked about his company’s raison d’être, Dr. Brown stated it is about information.
“A sad irony is that although we can now create substantial amounts of information capable of personalizing health-related care, our healthcare institutions are woefully ill-equipped to make use of it,” he stated of the healthcare industry’s dilemma in managing massive datasets. “In 2001, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen paid some thing like $100M to have his complete genome sequenced. These days, you and I can do that for much less than $1,000. And it is hunting like we can quickly drop 1 of these zeros. Along with that exponential lower in the expense of sequencing, there has been an explosion in our understanding of what these 3 billion DNA letters essentially imply. LifeOmic crawls public databases about the globe each evening and has compiled a list of more than 55 billion versions (known as variants) of our roughly 20,000 genes and their associations with a variety of illnesses.”
Dr. Brown additional explained an complete genome sequence is about 100GB worth of information, which contemporary electronic health-related record systems weren’t created to accommodate. They had been developed, he stated, for insurance coverage purposes—essentially, for facilitating reimbursements. They weren’t developed with an eye for patient care, let alone the “sort of ‘precision medicine’ created attainable by these incredible scientific breakthroughs,” Dr. Brown stated. An apparent inform, he added, is in cancer investigation. In this situation, there are two sequences: the patient’s and that of the illness.
“With that information and facts, we can recognize the precise mutations [changes] that are driving the cancer,” Dr. Brown stated. “The fascinating point is that armed with that know-how, we can regularly administer extremely targeted therapies alternatively of relying on old-college chemotherapy that just kills what ever moves.”
The LifeOmic group worked with physicians and researchers at the Indiana College of Medicine in developing a cloud-primarily based platform capable of manipulating these gargantuan datasets and, additional importantly, producing them usable to individuals. The function proved so effective, it promptly transitioned from the clinical investigation stage to the day-to-day therapy of complicated cancer circumstances at Indiana University Well being.
Seeing his function grow to be so effective so promptly had a profound impact on Dr. Brown, motivating him to do additional, to hold pushing LifeOmic forward.
“I’m extremely proud to say oncologists have applied our technologies to recognize actionable mutations and corresponding therapies for circumstances previously deemed hopeless. These are the stories that drive our group of computer software engineers, information scientists, geneticists, and physicians,” he stated. “Along the way, we indulged in a side project that took off in an unexpected way. Throughout my research at Johns Hopkins, I became fascinated with a course of action known as hormesis. It is this strange notion that several varieties of stress—as lengthy as they do not go as well far—actually make us healthier. No matter whether the strain is due to lack of meals, physical exertion, heat, cold, or altitude, our bodies have this incredible capability to deal and make positive we’re prepared for worse. It turns out the measures our bodies take to deal with these stresses cut down our threat of just about each chronic illness, from diabetes to cancer.”
On the other hand wildly effective, Dr. Brown realized all this possible had to be straight connected to individuals somehow. To that finish, his group constructed an app that physicians can suggest to individuals in order to much better communicate with them and, crucially, collect pertinent information and facts. In addition, the group developed what Dr. Brown described as a “flip book-style” tool that aids in writing and delivering patient education components. Each tools in the end are assistive technologies—just not in the classical sense that birthed this column, but accessibility nonetheless.
“This became a different firehose of information and facts that we could combine with the omics information sets I described previously to achieve a actual-time understanding of what was taking place in a patient’s body… I consider among the cloud platform and the patient engagement tools, LifeOmic has the most full finish-to-finish healthcare information management remedy in the globe,” Dr. Brown stated.
At a macro level, the function by Dr. Brown and his firm is about assisting recognize and avert catastrophic illnesses like cancer. He’s optimistic about the advancements in health-related tech, especially when it comes to genetics, in assisting physicians fully grasp how illnesses like cancer manifest and how to greatest treat it. Cancer, Dr. Brown stated, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg the concentrate on DNA has wide-ranging applicability, from neurology to cardiology to endocrinology and several additional disciplines. “Our target is to permit researchers and clinicians to tame these substantial information sets and use them to support individuals avert illness,” he stated. “And of course, to guide clinicians in taking benefit of this information and facts to personalize therapy when illnesses like cancer and Alzheimer’s in the end create.”
What LifeOmic is carrying out is a microcosm of the activity in the market at massive, with Dr. Brown telling me state governments are “actively examining strategies to leverage the possible of precision medicine at the population level to advantage millions of individuals.” The identical is taking place elsewhere in the globe Dr. Brown added the United Kingdom is currently speaking about sequencing a child’s genome at birth and then examining how that information may influence healthcare plans all through the person’s life. “That’s exactly where all of this is going. It has been incredible to watch the convergence of information and facts technologies and healthcare. With cloud-primarily based platforms, it is now attainable to aggregate all the overall health-associated information described above for every single patient,” Dr. Brown stated. “The subsequent step is to make this information and facts actionable and comprehensible to each clinicians and individuals. Offered the sheer scale of the information, the only way to achieve this is via automation.”
He continued: “Harried human physicians hardly have time to scan via the electronic health-related record just before seeing a patient now. They have no hope of becoming in a position to comprehend the gigabytes of information and facts in a entire genome sequence a lot much less to figure out how to make use of it in clinical practice. Significant-scale information aggregation platforms such as the 1 we’ve constructed are the entry ticket to this brave new globe. But the possible is enormous. Most excitingly, it gives the chance to bring customized care to individuals who at present do not have access to physicians and other overall health pros.”
Hunting towards the future, the target for Dr. Brown is to hold the momentum. As described, he began LifeOmic with hopes he could, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, make a dent in the healthcare universe. So far so great, but seeing as how technological progress is an immutable force, the objective is to move with it.
“It’s been gratifying to see that hope [transforming healthcare] realized in complicated cancer circumstances. Now the target is to expand use of our technologies to support healthcare pros of all varieties tailor their suggestions and therapies to the one of a kind demands of person individuals,” Dr. Brown stated. “If we view the demands of the field as a pyramid, the cloud platform is the really base. Mobile-primarily based patient engagement is the following layer. Subsequent up the stack are the graphical visualizations and analytic tools we’ve added for researchers, but the largest challenge is to make this technologies readily available to non-specialists: major care physicians, dietitians, physical therapists, and individuals themselves. We intend to address this challenge with selection-help tools that leverage AI to make precise suggestions. This is all going to take place. It is up to the complete field to reduce via the jungle of the [country’s] healthcare program to accomplish broad adoption and understand the huge possible. Researchers of the sort I wanted to be have paved the way. It is up to the rest of us to stroll it.”
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Steven is a freelance tech journalist covering accessibility and assistive technologies, and is primarily based in San Francisco. His function has appeared in such locations as The Verge, TechCrunch, and Macworld. He’s also appeared on podcasts, NPR, and tv.
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