Monitoring microbiome effects for scientific wellness using longitudinal multi-omic data on thousands of people
Nathan Price, PhD, Thorne HealthTech
To deal with the chronic disease issues of the 21st century, healthcare must increasingly focus on enhancing wellness and minimizing transition to disease — what Lee Hood and I have called Scientific Wellness (The Age of Scientific Wellness, Harvard Press). To enable scientific wellness, it is necessary to generate large amounts of data on healthy people to quantify the health phenotype and to observe the earliest transitions to disease in order to enable prediction and prevention. Deepening our understanding of the many health effects of the microbiome — and making it actionable to improve people’s health — is central to this transformation. I will discuss how such longitudinal 'deep phenotyping’ data has been used to: (1) inform about how our gut microbiome and blood metabolites are related; (2) how the gut microbiome becomes more unique to each individual in healthy aging (3) how the microbiome predicts both efficacy and side effects of statins (4) microbiome differences that were associated with weight loss success or not in a personalized wellness program and (5) how new technological advances such as Thorne’s ‘microbiome wipe’ and OneDraw blood collection device are making user experiences much easier to aid with broader adoption. Taken together, such approaches hold tremendous promise for the future of health optimization and preventive healthcare contextualized to each person’s unique microbiome, genome, lifestyle, and health history.
