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Can Precision Genomics, AI, and a New Perspective on Preventive Medicine Achieve This?
Healthcare is constantly evolving around the world as scientists and doctors discover new medicines, learn more about the brain and cells, and apply well-known practices to new medical mysteries. One area that seems to remain stagnant amongst the renaissance of others is preventive care. For Americans specifically, preventive care is often overlooked in the shuffle as citizens try and keep up with addressing serious or emergency issues. The CDC reportsthat seven out of 10 U.S. deaths are caused by a chronic disease, while roughly half of the country’s population has been diagnosed with a chronic illness, like cancer or heart disease. A 2020 study shows that it is estimated that only 8% of Americans undergo routine preventive screenings.
I spoke with Jo Bhakdi, founder and CEO of Quantgene, about what factors have played into the lack of innovation in preventive care, how he found his way to medicine from economics, and more. Quantgene combines precision genomics, cloud, AI, and a new perspective on preventive medicine in order to protect and extend human life. Alongside Quantgene’s team of scientists and engineers, Bhakdi is turning medicine into predictive data science to enhance the effectiveness and accessibility of healthcare for everyone. His mission is to extend the healthy human life span by a decade within a decade.
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Rhett Power: Thank you for speaking with me. I want to ask the major question first: what issue are you solving for and why are you the one to solve it?
Jo Bhakdi: One of the biggest problems that I think one could possibly solve for as an entrepreneur, deals with human life and the protection and extension of human life. The discipline, or vertical, that has been tasked with this mission is healthcare. People often forget that the mission of healthcare is to protect and extend human life. Unfortunately, in this day and age, this is now a debatable topic because some people don’t even agree with that. However, that’s my view. That is the mission of medicine. I’m a child of medical scientists and doctors, so I grew up with a backdrop of clinical research, but I’m an economist by trade, so I learned over time and through research that the biggest “bang for the buck” in healthcare, i.e. the most lives you can save with the least amount of money required, is in prevention. It’s not jumping in to solve for all diseases, it’s jumping in when one is healthy and making sure they never get sick. This is actually a whole science and research field that is very well understood in medicine but very poorly executed. Experts from many health verticals can all agree that the biggest thing we can do to reduce cost and save lives is preventative care; no one is contesting that. However, you look around and see that there are very few people actually doing that successfully. You do have experts making recommendations of what to do and not to do, but no one is applying technology and systems into the equation. This is what has led to what Quantgene is today. We started in genomics in order to solve the complicated questions and problems, and then pulled in a comprehensive data system that determines specifics for each individual patient: where is your health at now? What are your risks? What preventions do you need? Etc.
One of the reasons why this is important, to me, is a personal one. My mother was a physician and I lost her to cancer in 2015 after she missed a standard screening. If someone like my mother, a doctor who had every resource she needed to detect the disease early on, was still unable to catch it, then it affects everyone. Another reason why I think that I’m the person to solve for this problem is that I like economics, medicine, and technology, and I love abstract problems. The central challenge here is an abstract problem, but it has very real outcomes. As everyone knows, once you get diagnosed with late-stage cancer, that’s a very real non-abstract problem. In order to prevent that, you have to deal with data, risk, probabilities, and other abstract things.
RP: Not many people like to solve for abstract problems. Or, rather, they don’t have the time or resources.
JB: Exactly. Most people look at these problems and think they’re too abstract. What does risk mean here? What does it mean that someone’s risk is 8x higher? We know what that means. We know what to do with it. We can operationalize the entire thing. I was in finance before this, so evaluating risk to investing in startups is similar. So, in general, I think understanding the data and the probabilistic statistical piece of preventive medicine is the key to solving the prevention problem and then working to operationalize it and bring these abstract data points down to concrete actions. That’s what I love to do and that’s what we’re doing at Quantgene.
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RP: So what was it that inspired you to move out of economics and finance, investment, into solving the problem of extending human life?
JB: Well, I collected enough experience in that space to understand innovation. I have always been very interested in the discipline of innovation. I’ve always been interested in fundamental questions like Adam Smith asks in “The Wealth of Nations” as to why some nations are rich and others are poor. He came up with an entire theory, which is complicated but goes into free markets and pricing and so on. And I always found the most interesting question to be something similar: why are some civilizations successful and others are not? And it’s really about innovation. Some figure out how to engineer reality and invent new things and others don’t. It doesn’t truly come down to resources or anything like that. On an investment level or corporate level, I’ve been interested in those types of questions. Why is Tesla good but GM bad? Everything is a function of innovation, and if you crack that code then you crack all codes. So I did finance for a while and I started to understand a bit more how this all works, but then I kept coming back to the questions of, “how do you make it all work? Where do you apply that skill set or knowledge best” and eventually it came all the way back to my childhood and parents being doctors. If I had the choice of what is the best thing to innovate, the most important, it’s medicine. Then I found my way to what we’re doing at Quantgene in a half-strategic, half-tactical way. It was strategic because I know I want to innovate in medicine because human life comes first. It was tactical because we stumbled upon this cancer and genomics problem, and we learned that you can detect cancer early-stage in the blood. So I learned in 2014 that no one was thinking of the problem the way we were now thinking of it, and we jumped right in.
RP: Why is it that no one was thinking about this in the terms you were? Is this because of profit in healthcare or simply because nobody thought of it until now?
JB: I think the problem is that medicine and biology are so complicated that you have this infinite possibility space. If you do start research on a cell, there’s just literally no end. People can get excited about, and distracted by things very easily. I think part of the reason we are able to focus on this is that I’m a partial insider, having been infiltrated by medicine as a kid, and learning from my parents. But, I’m also an outsider because my career is based in economics. Now, when I look at medicine, I look at it from both angles at once. I think that’s very unique and it allows us to frame the problem differently. So with the overarching goal of extending human life in mind, we answer the questions like where is the economic value coming from? How do we turn this into an effective business model that can carry innovation? What structural barriers are there in the system? Are there companies who are incentivized to stop it or help it?
RP: Fascinating. But, how do you translate all of that into working directly with a patient to extend their lifespan?
JB: Well, we start the entire process with a medical intake, which is very important. Our intake is cutting edge, we capture all the data that is necessary to devise your profile. That then goes to a doctor who looks at it without you and assesses and sets up your dashboard. Then we review if there are any missing data points or if there is anything positive or negative or if any immediate actions that need to be taken. We review what screenings you may have missed, that you have all of your tests up to date, and organize your entire medical profile. Then we schedule a meeting for you to meet with a doctor for a telemedicine session. You meet with one of our physicians and they walk you through everything that we know, and don’t know, and explain it. Then we help them understand what actions need to be taken on current health issues or to get up to date on scans and tests to make sure we have all of the information needed. Then the process diverges from there based on what plan you’re paying for, what the results come back as, if you needed to take any additional tests, etc. But the next steps would include advanced genomics and cancer detection.
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RP: So you don’t just collect their blood and then call them 4 weeks later to alert them if they’re at risk for cancer?
JB: No, it’s much more collaborative than that and we walk them through several steps and work with care providers if needed.
RP: You’ve mentioned in a few other interviews that your mission is to extend the healthy human life span by a decade within a decade. When did that clock start ticking?
JB: Well, that’s a very good question because when you think about what happens when we achieve that, we’re not going to just drop the goal. We are going to continue with it. So it’s basically a continuous goal every decade. So technically, the clock started ticking when we started saying it, which was, I think last year or in 2020. But the good news is that the goal will continue as we help more people, starting with Quantgene’s Serenity members, and it will keep on.
