Dr. Snyder: I think the healthcare system is broken. I think when you're healthy, they just don't measure you very often and when they do, they measure very, very little. So you know, go into a doctor's office now and it looks like the doctor's office 40 years ago, they'll bring out the stethoscope, a few things, and measure, you know, 15 things, say, "Oh, you're great, go home."

Yeah, if you think about where the world is today, we can measure so, so much more. And so the genome is one thing, we talked about that with the diabetes. But you can make all kinds of molecular measurements. You can measure, as you say, all your RNA, all your proteins, all your metabolites, all your lipids in your blood, and you can do your metabolites and your lipids and your urine and proteins, and your microbiome, all these things you can measure.

And we don't know for sure what's important and what's not. But we do know we get a much more complete picture when we do that. It's like, looking, you know, at...say you're doing a jigsaw puzzle is what I would say we're doing now. Where if you put out five pieces, that's how medicine is today, you try and guess what that puzzle is like, or what is the picture in the puzzle. You really don't stand a very good chance from 5 pieces if it's a 1,000-piece puzzle. When you put all 1,000 pieces there, you have a pretty good idea what that picture is. And that's how we view health, we want to get the 1,000-piece picture on everybody. And we want to do it over time so we can see if that picture is changing.

So basically, that's what we're doing, we're profiling people very, very deeply, and then we do it over time so we can see the shifts. And one thing we've learned is that everybody's profile is different. I know that sounds obvious, but people don't realize how different they are. And in fact...and it doesn't matter which measurement we use, whether we're following your proteins, or your metabolites, or your lipids, your pattern will be very, very different than mine. And it'll be fairly stable over time, believe it or not, there will be some things that'll change but for the most part, it's the same.

And not only that, what happens is if you get sick, say you get a viral infection or something else, your profile will shift. But believe it or not, you will still look more like you than me when I'm sick. So what that means is that it's very hard to tell the difference when somebody is ill if you're comparing them to everybody else. But it's really easy when you compare them to themselves. So that's why we think these profiles are really important while people are healthy so you can detect that shift really, really easily. And it turns out that that's been very, very important.

So in our study, we have 109 people, and just from the first little over 3 years of profiling, 49, almost half, learned something important about their health. And it was all kinds of different areas. Some was in the area of cancer, some was in the area of cardiovascular, other the metabolic space. And just as some examples, we caught some with early lymphoma. Two people with pre-cancers, they weren't cancers yet, but they have a good chance of turning into cancer. We caught it early, they're called MGUS and smoldering myeloma. And then there were two people with serious heart issues, they had no idea. One was a really young guy, from his genome sequence, we figured it out. And another one is from wearables, and so on and so forth. Caught people with diabetes who didn't even know they had diabetes. And then we saw people become diabetic.

And it was no one technology. That's the power of this, this global profiling let us see the whole picture. And so sometimes it would be, for example, the genome sequence that discovered this, sometimes it might be the protein markers, and sometimes it was imaging, and it was no one, again, technology that did it. Sometimes it's the combination. See, well, the image looked a little off. Look, these protein markers are off. Let's do some follow-up there, and sure enough, you'd see the person had an underlying condition always before symptomatic. So it's very, very powerful. Half of these people learned, again, some pretty darn important things. You don't want to learn about you have a heart condition by getting a heart attack, that's not the way to learn. So we think this big data profiling is very, very important.

Dr. Patrick: Do you think that the trends from, you know, the way the healthcare system is now to this more precision medicine system that you're talking about where it's, like, you're gathering all this data from people and you're making very, you know...you're making decisions based on their personal data and a lot of it. Do you think that's something...like, how do you think we're going to be able to transition to that point because we will get there, right?

Dr. Snyder: Right. So there needs to be a change at so many different levels. One is don't mistake, what we're doing is a research project. But what we've learned is that what kinds of measurements are powerful that, you know, medicine can use. So once again, we've spun off a company. I'm a believer, academics are great at proof of principle and discovering things, but they're terrible at scaling. So we've formed a company, in this case, Q Bio that does a medical version, what I was saying. And it's not cheap, it costs $3,500, which some people can afford, but most people probably can't right now. But I hope, as time goes on, we'll get it cheaper.

We would still argue getting a thorough exam where they do deep molecular measurements and a whole-body MRI is still very powerful because the same thing, we caught a lot of diseases early. Some with early pancreatic cancer, for example, prostate, heart conditions, just from the first bunch of people we've been profiling. So we know this is powerful. Now, why won't medicine do it? Well, first of all, the system is broken, once again, nobody pays to keep you healthy. Medicine in the U.S., people typically get paid when they're ill. So if you know, you walk into a hospital that's when the doctor gets paid. Nobody...if you're healthy, nobody is going to pay you if you walk into a hospital to keep you healthy.

So we need to re-incentivize a system to make it different. And there are ways of doing that I think. So for example, probably pay employers to keep you healthy because then your productivity will be better. So I could see where if we could have, you know, big places, like, Google or Facebook, or what have you have their employees covered by these sorts of things, they would have healthier workers, and that would save them time. I think also economically if we can show...and certain areas, this has been done, like, for cardiovascular disease. You can probably make an argument that it is important to get people measured so they stay healthy because if they have a heart attack and go on long-term disability, that's really expensive.

So I think you have to find these niches. And the other thing you have to do, you have to show...like, insurers don't want to pay unless you've proven to them it works. And this is true for all new technologies even when it's pretty obvious, this is an important thing to do nobody will pay to implement it until you show it works, and it saves them money. Otherwise, there's no reason for doing it. So I think we need to change the mindset of the insurers, we need to have physicians embrace this stuff, that's another thing.

When genome sequencing first came out, we told people we're running around sequencing healthy people's genomes, a lot of physicians freaked out, told me what we're doing was wrong. They still tell me what we're doing is wrong, that we shouldn't be profiling so deeply, because you're going to learn all these things you're going to break the healthcare system, you're going to turn everybody in a hypochondriac. And I think that's just very demeaning to people because I think people...it's just very paternalistic. People are very good at deciding for themselves what they want or don't want in terms of information. And getting this information to catch disease early is a no-brainer to me, and people are going to handle it. Now, actually, they're warming up to the idea of genome sequencing is okay. But I guarantee 10 years ago most physicians thought this is a really bad idea.