Four For Friday | November 8, 2024
LF147 | Stanford's new Center for Human and Planetary Health, MethylGPT longevity predictor, costs of living longer, hundreds hospitalized by Lahore's smog + Enterprise AI framework
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
Stanford launches a hub for healthy habitats
Ok not their formulation exactly, but Stanford has just launched a center dedicated to ‘human and planetary health’, which is essentially the mandate of Looking Forward’s sister initiative, Healthy Habitats.
The new interdisciplinary hub seeks to address the interconnected challenges of health and environmental sustainability:
"It’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that our health is inextricably linked to the planet’s health. Climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable practices increasingly take their toll on both."
The Center for Human and Planetary Health will explore critical areas like pollution and health, and disease ecology, fostering collaboration to create real-world solutions. The group will research topics such as Pollution and Health (e.g. see story below), Food Systems, and Disease Ecology in a Changing World. and is offering $50k grants for Stanford-affiliated researchers looking to explore these issues.
The So What? Welcome focus by one of the world’s premier academic institutions on the complex interdependencies of health and the environment.
MethylGPT - a foundation model for longevity
One of the best biomarkers and predictors of aging is DNA methylation, which is measuring the process by which small molecules attach to DNA to instruct them to turn on or off. As we age, this process changes and can be measured, providing a good view into the state of human longevity.
To date, measuring this has been laborious, complicated and slow, however, a new AI foundation model, MethylGPT, created by Harvard researchers, promises to streamline this process. The result could be a better understanding of risks of up to 60 different diseases and more clarity on the effectiveness of longevity interventions such as fasting and HIIT.
The So What? A promising way to rapidly get personalised, predictive and preventative longevity insights.
Living longer in declining health - cost implications
Confirmation from a study in Spain of an important but not obvious insight that old age itself isn’t correlated with health costs, it’s the level of morbidity and presence of multiple chronic conditions:
Our results suggest that age and proximity to death are poor predictors of higher costs. Rather, healthcare costs are explained mainly by morbidity status, particularly whether someone has neoplasms or multiple LTCs. Morbidity measures should be included in future studies of healthcare costs.
The So What? From ageism to medical triage, there’s often a knee jerk reaction that aging means more healthcare. It doesn’t.
Hundreds hospitalized in Lahore
Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city with 13m people, has been suffering off-the-charts air pollution. It has the worst air in the world, at levels 15 times the limit for what is considered unhealthy. 700 people were hospitalized in one day, half of workers have been told to stay home and all primary schools have been shut all week.
The smog is seasonal, getting worse every year, and caused by multiple factors, but in particular local farmers burning crops together together with industrial emissions. Delhi, 260 miles away, is also increasing impacted by the smog, which has been estimated to reduce life expectancy by 8.5 years.
The So What? Expect more economic and health altering impacts of air pollution, plus growing policy and investment need for systemic innovations to tackle this.
Bonus - AI Report of the Week
A strategic vision for the AI-powered enterprise. This framework suggests three stages of increasing impact of AI adoption: Foundational Basics, New Core Competences and Competitive Advantage:
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen