It's always been you...

We have entered an era where we're moving away from a one size fits all medicine to a precisely personalized form of medicine that is based on our particular genes, biology, experiences, exposures. This story of us will help us to identify patterns in that story that enable us to create a predictive model of where we’re headed on the continuum from wellness to illness.

Our genes enable us to live as an organism with flexibility to live in a complex changing environment.  The universe around us changes all the time, and we got to have enough genomic genetic flexibility to adapt to those changes. It is the adaptability of our genes to go into new environments to capture new food sources that basically makes the world go round in an evolution.

What may surprise you is that the thing that really changes whether you can go into an environment is actually the microbes that live in us. Because they are - having 10 times genes than us - the interface between our internal and external environment.

There are differences in genomic potentials as well. So there are some people that have very resilient genomes, it doesn't matter what you do, they still live for a long time (we called this Churchill genes - he smoked, he drank, he had a stressful life, he lived a long time anyway. There are other people who have inborn areas of metabolism, they tend to die young and there's not much you can do about it. And, there's the rest of us, the ordinary yet the majority, where it's our genes and our environment that determine what happens to us. And precision medicine is, trying to capture the whole totality of that in order to make some judgments about us as an individual on how best to treat you going forward. This include treatment as well as prevention of diseases.

This is a a whole new way of thinking about health and disease based on, complexity and on multiple variables that influence how your genes are expressed into the current health state that you are, it's dynamic all the time and it's changing all the time based on everything you do, what you eat, how you move, what you think, your microbiome.  

Environmental exposures - the exposome - what you're exposed to throughout your life - be it internally or externally - seems like is responsible for 90 to 95% of all chronic diseases, NOT YOUR GENOME. It's been always YOU!