Feature
Making Medicine Personal
March 29, 2007
IU spin-off company promotes well-being by stopping illness before it happens
David Clemmer, IU professor of chemistry and co-founder of Predictive Physiology and Medicine, wants to help people use data to make healthy life choices.
Until very recently, medicine has worked almost exclusively as a reaction to illness: people who feel sick or are in pain see a doctor who diagnoses the problem and prescribes a course of treatment. More and more often, though, medical science and technology are heading down the path of prevention. Americans spend billions of dollars every year on weight loss programs, monitor and medicate their cholesterol levels, and try to stop smoking.
Now, Bloomington-based Predictive Physiology and Medicine (PPM), a startup company co-founded by IU chemistry professor David Clemmer, hopes to take preventive medicine to the next level.
"When you go to a doctor and get your blood tested, they screen at most for a few dozen things like cholesterol, psa [prostate specific antigen] and so on," said Clemmer, who started the company in 2004. "What we're developing is a way to take a person's blood sample and find biomarkers [the presence and/or absence of molecules that can indicate disease in its earliest stages] for everything under the sun."
The idea behind the company, in other words, is to tailor medicine to the individual patient by using data collected from the patient's blood to create detailed health profiles that assess a patient's overall wellbeing and allow her to make healthy, preventive lifestyle choices.
As PPM's executive vice president Steve Valentine explained, the first step toward offering such personalized care is creating a large database of biomarkers collected from a wide cross-section of individuals. An individual patient's blood can then be analyzed and compared to averages calculated in the database.
A biomarker for lung cancer found to deviate from the norm, for example, could indicate that the patient is at risk for developing lung cancer. The larger the database, the better it enables technicians to compare and interpret the biomarkers in an individual blood sample.
"We're still in the testing and development phase," said Valentine, who got a Ph.D. in chemistry from IU in 2001. "The end goal is to provide patients with a health and wellness 'score' based on the composition of their biomarkers. If the score is low and indicates potential problems, we'll provide advice for how the patient can alter his or her lifestyle to improve their overall health."
For Clemmer, who sees himself as an academic first and an entrepreneur second, starting a business has been a way to use his expertise in biochemical research for the common good.
"We're converting molecular information into meaningful insights about health," he said. "Some people in academia look at this as if it's not pure in some way, but to my mind the idea is to create value for everybody in the community and do good."
PPM currently has 5 full-time employees and has received several local and federal grants. The next steps, said Valentine, will involve clinical trials in order to secure FDA approval.
