The Right Chemistry: Health monitoring has come a long way, from rolled-up paper to AI |
Remember Theranos, the company that promised to revolutionize longevity by making health data instantly available from blood collected from a finger prick, allowing for “alerts” to make lifestyle changes?
The tiny amount of blood was introduced into the company’s “Edison” machine, which would then perform hundreds of tests including blood levels of cholesterol, glucose, hormones and markers for infectious disease. People could then resort to appropriate lifestyle and pharmaceutical interventions to avoid an early demise. But the only demise that happened was that of the company — because the claims of the Edison’s ability were fraudulent.
However, monitoring health status and predicting future disease from a drop of blood, which was Theranos’ fantasy, has become a reality.
Swift developments in technology have indeed made possible the detection of future health status from a tiny amount of blood through the application of genomics and proteomics. Steps can then be taken to increase the “health span,” the period of life spent in good health, free from chronic diseases.
The human body can be thought of as a chemical laboratory with thousands of reactions going on all the time. These reactions essentially constitute life. If we want to interfere with these reactions with hopes of improving health, we first have to identify what they do, be it their role in metabolism or the production of body structures.
Metabolism refers to the reactions involved in the conversion of energy stored in food into a usable form for cellular processes, as well as the breaking down of food into the building blocks that can then be assembled into proteins, nucleic acids and other important biomolecules. Obviously, an understanding of what is going on in the body at a given........