Signs of a long life

Signs of a long life Jun 26th 2008From The Economist print edition Rummaging through the by-products of cells and looking for patterns could help to unlock the secrets of better health PERSONALISED medicine offers a huge promise. It would, in theory, be possible to identify what diseases someone risks getting as they age, predict how those diseases will progress and show how they will respond to therapy—all before any symptoms are present. And by doing this early, it could mean that those diseases are easier to treat. It is the sort of medical crystal-ball gazing that was supposed to be one of the benefits of the Human Genome Project, although it is still a long way from yielding the benefits promised on its behalf. However, there is another “-ome” that contains a vast amount of information about a person’s health and now its secrets are starting to be unravelled too. Metabolomics studies metabolites, the by-products of the hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that continuously go on in every cell of the human body. Because blood and urine are packed with these compounds, it should be possible to detect and analyse them. If, say, a tumour was growing somewhere then, long before any existing methods can detect it, the combination of metabolites from the dividing cancer cells will produce a new pattern, different from that seen in healthy tissue. Such metabolic changes could be picked up by computer programs, adapted from those credit-card companies use to detect crime by spotting sudden and unusual spending patterns amid millions of ordinary transactions.