Popular Mechanics interviewed ISB Co-founder and Professor Dr. Lee Hood for an article titled “Leroy Hood Wants To Show You How To Live for a Really, Really Long Time.” The story features Hood’s big-data approach and a focus on disease prevention – all in the quest to help us live longer.
There is tremendous market and media frenzy around new Alzheimer’s disease drugs, but their efficacy is contested while the potential of prevention is untapped and underreported, Drs. Lee Hood and Nathan Price wrote in an opinion piece published by the Los Angeles Times.
The strongest associations with weight loss success or failure – independent of BMI – are found in the genetic capacity of the gut microbiome. These new findings open the door to diagnostic tests that can identify people likely to lose weight with healthy lifestyle changes and those who might need more drastic interventions.
Researchers from Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and other organizations have uncovered underlying metabolic changes that regulate how immune cells react to COVID-19. These findings are associated with COVID-19 severity and may predict patient survival. The work was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
ISB Co-founder Dr. Lee Hood hosted a fireside chat with NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins. The renowned scientists talked about their early careers and long friendship, the challenge of COVID-19, the preceding scientific work that led to the fast development of COVID vaccines, and much more.
The multi-year Coaching for Cognition in Alzheimer’s (COCOA) clinical trial is nearly complete. The trial examined diet, exercise and cognitive training as possible non-pharmacological interventions to Alzheimer’s, with some trial members receiving telephonic coaching centered on stress, diet and exercise, as well as brain training focusing on brain speed and attention.
The impact of Alzheimer’s Disease is staggering – 6 million Americans diagnosed, a financial toll of $600 billion annually, and no effective drug treatments. ISB Co-founder Dr. Lee Hood said the traditional approach isn’t working, and we need to think about it in brand new ways.
ISB researchers and their collaborators looked at the electronic health records of nearly 630,000 patients who were tested for SARS-CoV-2, and found stark disparities in COVID-19 outcomes — odds of infection, hospitalization, and in-hospital mortality — between White and non-White minority racial and ethnic groups.
ISB researchers and their collaborators are looking beyond the one-drug, one-solution approach that has thus far failed in Alzheimer’s disease research. Instead, they are focusing on other promising research avenues, such as the possible role of the gut microbiome in dementia.
ISB researchers examined the associations between the gut microbiomes of about 3,400 people and roughly 150 host characteristics. The team looked at diet, medication use, clinical blood markers, and other lifestyle and clinical factors, and found evidence that variations of the gut microbiome are associated with health and disease.
Dr. Nathan Price has been inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s (AIMBE) College of Fellows. Price was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for his contributions deriving medical and biological insights from large-scale data analysis and network modeling, and translating those insights to society.
In the two decades since joining Dr. Lee Hood as a postdoc, Dr. Qiang Tian has made a tremendous impact on ISB’s science and culture. March 31 is his final day at ISB, as he is returning to China and joining Shanghai’s National Research Center for Translational Medicine.
Jim Heath took over as president of Institute for Systems Biology on January 1. To fully appreciate Heath’s relationship with ISB, you have to go back to its early days – shortly after the research organization was founded in 2000.
