On Mar. 14, 2006, Providence Health & Services and the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) announced an affiliation that will transform health care to a proactive mode that is focused on keeping patients well and identifying the earliest opportunities to reverse or even prevent disease.

Leroy (Lee) Hood, MD, PhD, who was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama, served as senior vice president and CSO of Providence Health & Services, a five-state, not-for-profit health system, and continued as president of the Seattle-based ISB.

Providence and ISB will establish a number of joint research projects in scientific wellness, employing the approach of dense, dynamic personalized data clouds. These include: following and understanding early transitions from wellness to disease; analyzing patient populations longitudinally that are at risk for Alzheimer’s; helping breast cancer patients recover from illness following debilitating therapies; and utilizing novel approaches to successfully treat glioblastoma, an inevitably fatal type of brain tumor. For example, the hope is that through systems-driven approaches, we will convert glioblastoma to a chronic disease in five years (like HIV/AIDS) and in 10 years we will have a cure. These approaches will lead to medicine that is vastly improved in quality and significantly less expensive.

ISB’s goal is to develop metrics to quantify scientific wellness and identify the earliest markers of transition for all common diseases. It is focused on generating dense, dynamic and personalized clouds of billions of de-identified data points that will provide unique insights into the wellness and disease of each individual over time. This will enable the understanding of disease mechanisms and the ability to design diagnostic and therapeutic tools that will allow the early reversal of disease back to wellness – or even prevent the onset of the disease in the first place. This represents a bold new approach to preventive medicine.

The affiliation will enable ISB to expand its research capacity during the next few years and recruit outstanding new faculty in the areas of systems biology, technology development, data and analytics and translational medicine. In addition, ISB will collaborate with the large pool of Providence affiliated clinicians and scientists in exciting new translational research initiatives that will build on the leading-edge programs in basic, translational and clinical research already underway at both institutions.