In 1985 Leroy Hood was one of the high-profile molecular biologists called to a power summit in Santa Cruz, California. The goal of the meeting was to determine whether an institute should be established there to sequence the entire human genome—a costly and complex undertaking. The idea had its skeptics, but Hood viewed the effort as crucial to creating information-based medicine and, ultimately, treating disease at the genetic level. His view prevailed, and the project famously completed its full map of the human genome in 2003.
With this vast wealth of information in hand, Hood is pushing a new approach to medicine that he calls P4—predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory. “The foundation of P4 medicine is the idea that in the near future we will have the tools to reduce enormously complex data from 300 million Americans to simple hypotheses about health and disease for each individual,” he says. So far the payoff for treating genetic disease has been scant. But a flurry of recent breakthroughs has made Hood, now president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, hopeful that his elegant new techniques for mining the genome and studying its interplay with the environment will soon transform medicine.
