ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet descending underwater during spacewalk training at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, USACOPYRIGHT ESA/NASA As medicine has evolved, we have developed epidemiological and pharmacological approaches using surrogates and population averages, often addressing look-alike symptoms with uniform treatment protocols. But no patient is “average”—we all have unique genes and lifestyles, which we experience in varying environments.
The next leap in the health sector, therefore, will come from the disentanglement of these uniquely individual traits. For example, the expression of many genes depends on environmental factors, including one’s diet, microflora, or exposure to pollutants, and such factors do not have the same effects on everyone. Similarly, lifestyle changes can influence one’s health, but this alone cannot overcome all genetically defined traits or environmentally induced medical conditions. Unveiling such interdependence will shed a completely new light on the complexity of our dynamic health status.
By trying to understand these interactions, a new paradigm emerges—namely to address health from an individual, participatory, and probabilistic approach. Cheaper and rapid high-throughput genomics and other omics, together with big data handling via supercomputing, have already greatly increased ...
