Dr. Don Brown is the founder and CEO of LifeOmic.
LifeOmic
For Dr. Don Brown, accessible technologies signifies far more accessible information.
Dr. Brown is the founder and CEO of LifeOmic, a digital overall health firm focused on creating the infrastructure and foundation of overall health technologies. LifeOmic describes itself on its web page as “laser-focused on driving the most revolutionary precision healthcare technologies forward to resolve healthcare’s most complicated challenges.” Basically place, it signifies creating complicated information sets far more accessible to business persons such as suppliers, researchers and organizations. The large image concept is apparent: far more accessible information for experts leads to improved, far more effective patient care in terms of actual healthcare practice. Of course, improved and far more effective care is surely desirable to persons with disabilities.
LifeOmic was designed immediately after Dr. Brown committed a portion of the proceeds from the sale of a prior firm, a software program firm named Interactive Intelligence, in 2016. In an e-mail interview earlier this month, he explained that the cause for LifeOmic was to “solve a vexing trouble the overall health care technique in basic, and cancer therapy in particular—extreme troubles in making use of the vast ‘omics’ datasets that have shown such massive guarantee.” (As Wikipedia explains, omics is a colloquial term in the scientific globe for “different disciplines in biology whose names finish in the suffix -omicssuch as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, phenomics and transcriptomics.”)
“I began LifeOmic with the conceit that a little firm could step in and make a distinction in healthcare,” Dr. Brown stated of founding the firm.
When asked about his firm cause for existencedr. Brown stated it really is about information.
“The sad irony is that even though we can now produce enormous amounts of information that can personalize healthcare care, our healthcare facilities are woefully ill-equipped to take benefit of it,” he stated of the healthcare industry’s trouble in managing large information sets. “In 2001, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen paid a thing like $one hundred million to have his complete genome sequenced. These days you and I can do it for significantly less than $1000. And it appears like we’ll be in a position to throw out a single of these zeroes quickly. Along with that exponential reduce in the price of sequencing, there has been an explosion in our understanding of what these 3 billion DNA letters basically imply. LifeOmic searches public databases about the globe each and every evening and has compiled a list of more than 55 billion versions (named variants) of our about 20,000 genes and their associations with different ailments.
Dr. Brown went on to clarify that the entire genome sequence is about one hundred GB worth of information, which contemporary electronic healthcare record systems are not developed to accommodate. They have been designed, he stated, for insurance coverage purposes – basically, to facilitate reimbursement. They have been not designed with an eye toward patient care, let alone “the type of ‘precision medicine’ that these astounding scientific discoveries have produced doable,” Dr. Brown stated. Cancer investigation is apparent, he added. In this situation, there are two sequences: the patient’s and the disease’s.
“With that details, we can determine precise mutations.” [changes] that drive cancer,” stated Dr. Brown. “The fascinating issue is that armed with that information, we can usually apply very targeted therapies alternatively of relying on old-college chemotherapy that just kills every little thing that moves.”
The LifeOmic group worked with physicians and researchers at Indiana University College of Medicine to make a cloud-primarily based platform capable of manipulating these enormous information sets and, far more importantly, creating usable for persons. The perform proved so productive that it swiftly moved from the clinical investigation stage to the everyday remedy of complicated cancer situations at Indiana University Wellness.
Seeing his perform come to be productive so swiftly had a profound impact on Dr. Brown, motivating him to do far more, to preserve pushing LifeOmic forward.
“I am extremely proud to say that oncologists have utilized our technologies to determine actionable mutations and proper therapies for situations previously regarded hopeless.” “These are the stories that drive our group of software program engineers, information scientists, geneticists and physicians,” he stated. “Along the way, we indulged in a side project that took off in an unexpected way.” In the course of my research at Johns Hopkins, I became fascinated with a procedure named hormesis. This strange idea is that a lot of sorts of stress—as extended as they never go also far—actually make us healthier. Whether or not the strain is due to lack of meals, physical exertion, heat, cold or altitude, our bodies have an astounding capacity to cope and come to be prepared for the worst. It turns out that the measures our bodies take to deal with this strain decrease the threat of almost each and every chronic illness, from diabetes to cancer.
As wildly productive as he was, Dr. Brown realized that all this prospective somehow had to be straight connected to individuals. To that finish, his group designed an app that physicians can advise to persons to improved communicate with them and, most importantly, collect relevant details. In addition, the group designed what Dr. Brown described as a “flip book” style tool to enable create and provide patient education components. Each tools are at the finish of assistive technologies – just not in the classic sense that originated in this column, but accessibility nonetheless.
“This became one more supply of details that we could combine with the omics datasets I pointed out earlier to acquire a genuine-time understanding of what is going on in the patient’s body… I feel that involving the cloud platform and the patient engagement tool, LifeOmic has the most total the world’s finish-to-finish healthcare information management option,” stated Dr. Brown.
At the macro level, the perform of dr. Brown and his firm is about assisting to determine and protect against catastrophic ailments like cancer. He is optimistic about advances in healthcare technologies, particularly when it comes to genetics, in assisting physicians fully grasp how ailments like cancer manifest and how to most effective treat it. Cancer, stated Dr. Brown, is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg the concentrate on DNA has wide applications, from neurology to cardiology to endocrinology and a lot of other disciplines. “Our purpose is to allow researchers and clinicians to harness these big information sets and use them to enable individuals protect against illness,” he stated. “And of course, to guide clinicians to use this details to personalize remedy when ailments like cancer and Alzheimer’s ultimately create.”
What LifeOmic is carrying out is a microcosm of activity in the business as a entire, and Dr. Brown told me that state governments are “actively exploring approaches to harness the prospective of precision medicine at the population level to advantage millions of persons.” The similar is taking place elsewhere in the globe Dr Brown added that the UK is currently speaking about sequencing a child’s genome at birth and then examining how that information can influence overall health care plans all through a person’s life. “That is exactly where all this goes.” It was astounding to watch the convergence of details technologies and healthcare. With cloud-primarily based platforms, it is now doable to aggregate all of the overall health-associated information pointed out above for every single patient,” stated Dr. Brown. “The subsequent step is to make this details actionable and understandable for each clinicians and individuals.” Offered the sheer volume of information, the only way to accomplish this is automation.”
He continued: “Exasperated human physicians barely have time to scan an electronic healthcare record ahead of seeing a patient nowadays. They have no hope of creating sense of the gigabytes of details in the entire genome sequence, considerably significantly less understanding how to use it in clinical practice. Massive-scale information collection platforms like the a single we’ve constructed are the ticket to this brave new globe. But the prospective is big. Most excitingly, it provides the chance to give customized care to persons who at the moment do not have access to physicians and other healthcare experts.”
Seeking to the future, Dr. Brown’s purpose is to preserve the momentum going. As pointed out, he began LifeOmic with the hope that it could, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, make a dent in the healthcare universe. So far so very good, but offered that technological progress is an immutable force, the purpose is to continue with it.
“It was a pleasure to see that hope.” [transforming healthcare] realized in complicated situations of cancer. The purpose now is to expand the use of our technologies to enable healthcare experts of all sorts tailor their suggestions and therapies to the exclusive requirements of person individuals,” stated Dr. Brown. “If we appear at the requirements of the field as a pyramid, the cloud platform is the extremely base.” Mobile-primarily based patient engagement is the subsequent layer. Subsequent are the graphical visualizations and analytical tools we’ve added for researchers, but the greatest challenge is creating this technologies accessible to non-professionals: key care physicians, dieticians, physical therapists, and individuals themselves. We intend to address this challenge with choice assistance tools that use artificial intelligence to make precise suggestions. This is all going to take place. It really is all more than the field to reduce via the jungle [country’s] healthcare technique to accomplish widespread adoption and recognize its massive prospective. The researchers I wanted to be they paved the way. It really is up to the rest of us to comply with him.”
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Stephen is a freelance tech journalist covering accessibility and assistive technologies, primarily based in San Francisco. His perform has appeared in locations like The Verge, TechCrunch, and Macworld. He has also appeared on podcasts, NPR and tv.
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