Traitwise.com Launch at Health 2.0 Conference

The Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week was a great event. It is nice to see such attention being paid to the area of technology in health care. There were a lot of neat people and companies who participated. One in particular garnered the most interest from me. Trait Wise was one of the 10 companies choosing the Health 2.0 conference to launch their site. It is a fantastic concept and deserves our participation. If Trait Wise (www.traitwise.com) is successful the payoff will be greater than any of the other companies and concepts at Health 2.0. That is a rather bold statement but I will hopefully substantiate the assertion.

Reliable data about the infinite variables effecting our health has been impossible to produce. That's hopefully the past. Trait Wise is attempting to crowd source what they call the "phenotype" data of the human condition. "By 'phenotype' we mean all the aspects of the human condition that are not chemical -- the reactions to treatments, the feelings, emotions, actions, attitudes, and the environment, to name a few," to quote their website. By inviting participation from health care and the population at large they are hoping to build a database, which will reveal correlations, trends or other observations. This data can point the way for scientific research in order to bring personalized medicine into reality. Participants are encouraged to answer large numbers of questions and to generate questions. Instead of a select, minority of scientists bearing the burden of observing trends, the world's populace can participate. Then let the computers process the data.

As a health care provider (nurse anesthetist) who is not in an academic center, I have limited ability to spur research. Although, I have encountered thousands of patients over 24 years in health care, many of whom have caused me to have questions in my own mind. I have often wondered what variables in patients' lives have brought them to the state of health wherein I encountered them. Why does one person live a healthy life into their 90s and another not? What are the behaviors that will make me most healthy? We know some of the macro answers to those questions, like don't smoke, don't stress, eat lots of whole grains and vegetables and so on. But we don't know the personal, individual answers and until recently, we had little hope of ever knowing.

Creating a database of myriad questions, which myriad people need to answer, is the start of a great process whereby personal, individual medicine is possible. Once the database achieves significant power (let the statisticians figure those numbers out) then trends and correlations can be compared to genotype information. The genome and epigenome will point to many more cures than pharmaceutical R&D ever has. If an individual or group of individuals are known to be at risk for renal carcinoma, then there is likely some "phenotype" data to help them make choices to minimize the risk or avoid the cancer altogether. Basically, instead of being confused by the onslaught of consumer health information (e.g. one article says coffee is good for you and another says coffee is not good for you) this kind of database has the potential to let the individual know if coffee is good for that one person. All health data has to eventually be that personal and granular.

We have upwards of 80,000 chemicals in existence in the U.S. There are almost an infinite number of molecules in the food and beverages we consume. We make choices every day about life that also could lead us in an infinite number of directions. It is worth starting the process of revealing how all of those variables impact us. It is worth making sure we have the freedom that comes with knowledge specific to the individual. It is worth answering all the questions. It is worth asking all the questions. If we don't, we give up our freedom by omission and should take what comes our way with resignation.