“Wouldn’t you like to know that you could be in your 90s and still be creative, productive and an excited human being for life?”
We’re delighted to have had the chance to speak to genomics pioneer Leroy Hood recently, ahead of his keynote talk at The Festival of Genomics, Biodata & AI. In this interview, he explores how AI is set to revolutionize healthcare by shifting the focus from treating disease to optimizing lifelong wellness. He discusses the power of personalized data—from blood analysis to wearables—in predicting and preventing illness, the role of AI in supporting physicians, and the importance of making these innovations accessible to all.
Please note transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
FLG: Hello everybody. Today, I’m here with genomics pioneer Leroy Hood ahead of his keynote talk at The Festival of Genomics, Biodata and AI in Boston. Lee, we’re so excited to welcome you back to The Festival. How are you doing today?
Leroy Hood: I’m doing fine. I’m looking forward to attending The Festival once again.
FLG: This is going to be your second keynote talk at The Festival, and we loved your talk in 2024. This year you’re going to be discussing the AI-driven future of health, from genomes to wearables and predictive wellness. So, let’s dive into that. You said healthcare will shift from treating disease to optimising wellness, but what does that look like in everyday life?
Leroy Hood: I think in everyday life, it looks like taking measurements from each individual and from those unique responses, fashioning out the actionable possibilities one needs, either to optimise their wellness or to avoid disease. And in fact, it’s absolutely clear that we’re all unique, and we’ll all require very unique ways of going about these features. So, rather than thinking that everybody can be healthy by doing X, it’s more about looking into who you are and asking, what are your unique opportunities and what are your unique challenges?
FLG: And let’s say we fast forward a few years. How do you think AI-driven health will change how we interact with healthcare, with our doctors?
Leroy Hood: I think what AI will enable us to do is take the unique features of each individual and compare them with the catalogue of 10s of 1000s of actionable possibilities that can improve health or avoid disease. And then from those 10s of thousands, pick the unique ones that can be most effective for you. I think AI will also be able to deliver the nature of your opportunities to your physician, the kinds of things the physician should be watching and following. And it will create a unique marriage, I think, between AI and physicians that gives them the ability to be domain experts in many fields of medicine and to treat patients as they never could have treated patients before.
FLG: That sounds really exciting. But when it comes to AI, I think most people think of ChatGPT. That’s what most people are exposed to, and that’s what AI means to them. So, a lot of people are a little bit skeptical about what AI actually is and what it can do. What would you say to people who are maybe apprehensive about the integration of AI into healthcare?
Leroy Hood: Well, I think this integration requires extremely careful curation by physicians, so when we put these 1000s of possibilities together, we know they’re real and they’re validated in the literature. We’re setting up an AI system so that with each actionable possibility, the physician will not only get a description of what it can do for the patient and what the patient should do, but it’ll give the references in the literature that validates this as a legitimate opportunity to improve wellness or avoid disease.
FLG: What kinds of data, be that from a wearable or a blood test, will matter most in this new model of health?
Leroy Hood: I think the data that’s going to matter most is the elements in the blood that we can quantify, the clinical chemistries, the proteins, the metabolites, the lipids and so forth. And the reason for that is that all of your organs, they secrete molecules into the blood, and if you can identify the origin of those molecules, you can make assessments about state changes that occur in organs in the body. So, I think the blood, in a sense, is an enormously powerful window to look into the individual and assess in a systems, global, holistic manner, how the entire individual is doing, not just the liver or just the heart. We can actually scan most of the organs that secrete molecules into the blood.
I think a second really major area that’s important, and will become increasingly important, is the wearables. They give us a sense of the physiology of the individual and the unique ways we can optimise that physiology through appropriate exercise, through sleep, through stress management, all the classic things that are really a part of being well. I think the wearables have the opportunity to democratise data-driven health in the sense that they’ll allow you at home to make many of the measurements that will be key for making some of these assessments in the future. And we’re finding that the integration of the wearables with blood and brain measurements, and with microbiome, it’s a kind of whole person integration that can uniquely optimise wellness for the individual and give them warnings about disease transitions and suggestions about how to avoid or prevent the onset of real disease.
FLG: How early in life can this kind of approach begin to make a difference?
Leroy Hood: I think it should begin to make a difference when you’re born. There’s something called rare diseases. These are diseases caused by single gene defects in individuals, and they’re rare, because less than one in 20 or 30,000 people would have a particular kind of defect. But the point is, there are perhaps 10,000 of these rare diseases, and actually more than 10% of the American population have one of those rare diseases. They often operate very early in childhood, and that’s why it’s important to know about them as early as possible. But they can come on later, and insights into which of these rare mutations you have will give physicians very practical opportunities to ameliorate the effects they might have, either early or late in your development.
FLG: Do you foresee that this kind of predictive health future will be accessible to everyone? And do you think that there’s still work to do on that accessibility side?
Leroy Hood: Oh, there’s enormous work to do on the accessibility side of things. There are several kinds of work. One is we’d like to democratise the measurements we make for data-driven health so they’re relatively inexpensive. We’re actually proposing a million-person Genome-Phenome project that is a run on from the Human Genome Project, and the analysis of these people over a 10-year period will give us all the data we need to one, validate the enormous health improvements and two, show that there will be striking cost savings from avoiding chronic diseases, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer and the like. And number three, we’ll be able to push the development of the technologies so that the cost of the measurements will drop by 100-fold, if not 1000-fold, so that they’ll be affordable for everyone. So, giving everybody access through reasonable pricing is one big challenge.
The second big challenge. In 2000 I made the proposal that healthcare should be predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory. And the first three P’s, prediction, prevention and personalised, are all about science, and we know how to do the science pretty well. Now, how do you persuade individuals that what is good for them, they should do? The ability to persuade people and to educate people is one of the major challenges of this new medicine, because, in a sense, you’re the master of your own health. Completely. 90% of your health probably comes from your behaviour and your environment. So, you can make an enormous difference in how healthy you are. How do we persuade you to do the things that data from your own body says should be done? That’s the big challenge.
FLG: You mentioned a million-person Genome-Phenome project. When it comes to recruiting a million people into a project like that, do you face the same challenges when it comes to recruitment?
Leroy Hood: Well, I hope it will be different from any other programme that has ever been carried out before, in the sense that we’ll do two important things with the data from these million people. One is that for each of them, we will improve their health by giving back the actionable possibilities that let them become healthier and avoid disease. And we will actually use this whole thing to pioneer the development of micro-techniques and rapid techniques and AI that will make this really inexpensive in a deliverable kind of manner. And of course, it’ll show the enormous cost savings that come from avoiding chronic diseases. Namely, of the $5 trillion we spend a year on American health, 86% goes to chronic diseases. And imagine if you could begin to cut those chronic diseases by a factor of 10% and 50% and 80%. You’re talking about saving millions of dollars. Ideally, the money you save could go into the into the wellness and prevention side of things.
FLG: We’re talking about a lot of data here. How do we ensure that people’s personal data and their personal health data is used ethically and that it’s kept secure?
Leroy Hood: Well, I think the issue of security has been solved. I mean, I’m not saying that some super genius couldn’t come in and figure out ways to do things, and maybe with quantum computing you can begin to unlock secrets, but I think classic security has been solved in the million-person project. The really key thing is that we will disassociate the analysis of the data from the people who are actually carrying out the analyses. There’ll be physicians that will know the connection, that can make assessments of the data that is generated, but the people who are doing the real analysis, it’ll be totally anonymous in that way. Hence, you won’t be able to go back to individuals, unless you go through the physicians that have the keys, and you want physicians to have the keys, because if you discover a subset of people that you can do something dramatic and new with, you want to be able to treat them. So, you have to keep track of them to be able to do so. I think it isn’t to say that security is trivial, but it can be done, and it can be done very effectively, and it’s been done in small cases, I think, very effectively and tested.
FLG: What excites you the most right now about the intersection of AI and healthcare? What are some of the most exciting breakthroughs that are happening?
Leroy Hood: I think the most exciting breakthrough is that we’ll be able to provide a tool for physicians that will dramatically improve their ability to diagnose and treat their patients and to give them practical solutions that are focused on modifying their behaviour and their environment. As opposed to, in the case of cancer, one different drug after another that works for four months, and then you take the next one, and then you take the next one. I think most chronic diseases, by the time they’re diagnosable, from a biological point of view, have many disease-perturbed complex networks. Any one drug is only going to hit one of those. It’s, in a sense, going to hit a symptom. It’s not going to hit the system. So the key to dealing with chronic diseases is to identify them early and reverse them when they’re very, very simple, and this simple concept really could lead to trillions of dollars of savings in health care and dramatically change people’s lives.
I think one of the most important things that I’m excited about is the idea that, one, wellness is a fundamental part of each of us, in letting us exhibit the very best of what we can be. And number two, it’s going to expand our health span. That is the number of years we live healthy, mentally alert, physically capable and so forth. And my feeling is that we can routinely do it for many people into the 90s or even beyond. And of course, that really raises some interesting sociologic issues, like, what does retirement mean? And if you’re going to live that long, how do you create the resources so you can live a reasonable life and so forth? We’ll have to rethink social security and health insurers, all of these different kinds of things are going to be absolutely fascinating opportunities. But wouldn’t you like to know that you could be in your 90s and still be creative, productive and an excited human being for life?
FLG: Well, it certainly is an exciting prospect. I think everybody would answer yes to that question. So, as I mentioned earlier, you’re speaking at The Festival in June, and you were last there two years ago. What did you enjoy about the event?
Leroy Hood: I think the diversity of people and their ideas all focused on genomic medicine in the broadest sense. And I think the camaraderie among the people was really great. I think there’s enormous respect for people that are doing very, very different kinds of things. There are some people that are about analysis, there are some people that are about technology, and there are some people that are about the clinical applications of these things. And bringing the power of these three things together with AI and all, I think, is an unparalleled opportunity to catalyse this fundamental change in health.
FLG: We’re really passionate about bringing people together to have those kinds of conversations. But what role do you think gatherings like this play in shaping the future of healthcare?
Leroy Hood: Well, I think for the senior people that come, they always go away with new ideas and new ways of thinking about what they’re doing, and that is really exciting, from my point of view. But I think even more important, the students and other scientists that come to learn about this thing will go away with very, very new insights. I’ve had all sorts of students in the past come and say, I heard you give a lecture at this conference, and it changed how I thought about getting into genomics or phenomics or whatever it might have been. And I think it’s the education and inspiration of the young people that can be a very exciting part of what this conference can do.
FLG: And what do you hope people take away from attending the event?
Leroy Hood: I hope they take away the idea that we have a broken health care system, a seriously broken health care system. That the whole profit motive is focused around disease and not around wellness and prevention, and that we have to create a system that changes in that fundamental way if we’re really to optimise the health of people in the ways that we want. The disease focused system does incremental things, it is never going to cure cancer. It’s way too complicated, for the most part, to cure it. And I’m not saying you can’t cure some cancers, but I mean, you take a lot of the common ones. I remember reading in the New York Times about a woman with breast cancer, who’d gone through eight targeted therapeutic drugs before she finally ended up dying, and those drugs cause enormous side effects. They’re expensive. I mean, it’s a horrible experience for families to go through, where you lose your savings, you don’t feel that well most of the time, because the drugs cause a lot of different side effects, apart from killing for a temporary time, some of the cancer cells. So I think it would be terrific if people realised how important it is to begin thinking about fundamental changes in how we approach healthcare.
FLG: Well, that is really exciting. Thank you again for taking the time to speak to me today and to everybody watching this interview, make sure you get to the MCEC early to catch those morning keynote sessions and hear Lee’s talk. Thank you.
