An Academic's Perspective of Commercializing a Concept in the Food and Health Area

Public health is faced with the task of delivering disease prevention to the population. Since the health of a population is the sum of the health of all individuals, and individuals do not have the same disease risks, preventing disease will be successful only by personalizing health itself. This is a complex problem, but not impossible. Complex, dynamic systems are managed by a continuous process of measurement, correction, measurement, correction. Personal health will need a similar process of 1, making measurements that distinguish individual idiosyncratic departures from optimal health (however caused) and 2, guiding individuals to appropriate solutions. Both are critical to success. Today, neither of these necessary elements is available to the world’s population increasingly suffering from completely preventable diseases. Why not? A case can be made that the (necessary) system of regulatory oversight for disease management has been disabling when applied to health management. Disease prevention and disease resolution are not the same. Targets, costs and solutions differ, hence regulatory oversight should too. The targets of human health diversity, metabolism, immunity, physiology, microbiology, etc., need to be identified. These targets must be adapted to fast, accurate and inexpensive analytical measurement platforms. These analytical platforms will form the product portfolio of a competitive industry providing personal health information. Regulatory oversight is critical to ensuring safety and yet maintaining an open competitive marketplace. The diagnostics of disease must be regulated aggressively for outcome. The consequences of a false positive or false negative are devastating. Hence the regulatory oversight of disease appropriately requires extensive and expensive investment prior to regulatory approval. However, the diagnostics of health need not be subject to the same barriers to approval. If health measures were more rapidly brought to practice and more broadly disseminated, individuals could monitor their own health and solution providers (food, device, lifestyle) could document their efficacy. If regulatory oversight continues to demand long term disease outcomes as the sole basis of efficacy, prevention will never be an option.