Aquatic training to prepare for space mission. Source: NASA
Chapter four of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s account of the Mercury space program, is devoted to the numerous and often invasive physical and psychological tests the astronauts and would-be astronauts endured.
The chapter, entitled “The Lab Rat,” tells the story of the men being strapped into “a huge human milkshake apparatus,” spending three hours in a 130-degree heat chamber, and being poked, probed, and sampled in tests involving “straps, tubes, hoses, and needles.”
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While not as physically or psychologically demanding, the 10,000 volunteers of a four-year “moonshot” study will have their biological systems “simultaneously and longitudinally” measured through the use of “bodily fluid biomarkers, imaging psychosocial, behavioral, socioeconomic, geospatial, physiometric, and molecular tools,” according to a Stanford Medicine news release.
Verily Life Sciences, formerly Google Life Sciences, is partnering with Stanford and the Duke University School of Medicine on the effort, known as Project Baseline, which was formally initiated on Wednesday.
“We are creating a new set of tools for medical discovery, with the aspiration that these tools and others from the broader community will pave the way for rich real-world insights, and potentially one day add to the way care is delivered,” stated a Verily blog item, posted by Dr. Jessica Mega, Verily’s chief Verily Life Sciences. “Today, we begin.”
Mega described Projection Baseline as an “opportunity to characterize human health with unprecedented depth and precision,” and “the first step on our journey to comprehensively map human health,” in a news release.
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A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Volunteers at Duke and Stanford sites in North Carolina and California – as well as at the California Health and Longevity Institute in Westlake Village – will be enrolled in the months ahead.
Their data will be collected during repeat clinic visits, through wrist-worn devices and other sensors, and from the use of interactive surveys and polls via smartphones, computers, or call centers, according to the release – which noted that biospecimens taken will include “blood and saliva, among others.”
The endeavor was described in more graphic terms by the MIT Technology Review which called it a project scrutinizing “spit, tears, stool, heartbeats, and genomes to search for new predictors of disease.”
Bloomberg reports that the blood sample will be used for DNA sequencing and the initial two-day battery of tests will include a stool sample (for use in a gut bacteria scan), a chest X-ray, electrocardiogram, and psychological assessment. Participants will have their sleep, heart rate, sweat, and steps measured over the course of the study. Health records, telephone, and social media activity may also be measured.
While Project Baseline aims “to engineer a true 21st-century approach” to personalized health, Bloomberg reports that Verily has stopped talking about producing medical marvels such as glucose-monitoring contact lenses and stopped describing its endeavors as industry-changing “moonshots.” (Though the term is still used extensively in news reports.)
Among Verily’s stalled projects was the development of a hand-held, “Star Trek”-style “tricorder.” In the meantime, a company using the name Final Frontier Medical Devices was awarded $2.5 million when it beat out 300 other entries in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition.
“We grew up,” Andy Conrad, Verily chief executive officer, told Bloomberg. He added that, rather than offering spectacle and drama, real moonshots involve day-to-day drudgery in practical matters like installing rivets and wiring.
While total costs remain under wraps, Project Baseline has been in the works since 2014, and the MIT Technology Review noted that existing agreements call for payments of at least $41.5 million to Stanford and $33 million to Duke.
Several reports included comparisons between Project Baseline and the Framingham Heart Study which has tracked thousands of residents of the Massachusetts town for generations since 1948. Just as the Framingham study yielded insights into the benefits of proper diet and exercise and the negative impacts of smoking, there is hope that Project Baseline data will have lasting and significant impacts.
While the study itself will go on for four years, Mega’s blog post states that the studying will go indefinitely, and that “the intent is to make de-identified data from the Project Baseline study available to qualified researchers to spur new ideas across the broad ecosystem.”
Photo: NASA
