Over the past two years, we’ve experienced the collision of the fast pandemic of COVID-19 with slow pandemics of obesity, diabetes and other chronic disease: the nonelderly with such underlying health issues were most likely to suffer serious illness or death. Our communities have been hit so hard because we were neither prepared for pandemic threats nor had sufficient health resilience. Too many people were too vulnerable because of their poor health — but it does not have to be this way.
Flagship's Preemptive Health & Medicine Initiative is pioneering a new field to protect, maintain, or improve people's health before they get sick. Starting with the premise that health should be accessible for all, this initiative is pursuing interventions that protect health from external threats (health security) and those that can prevent or delay the onset of diseases (preemptive medicine). This work has the potential to revolutionize the way we prepare for the next infectious disease threat and the way we prevent and preempt disease such as Type 2 Diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders.
Preemptive Health is the defining challenge of our times. While COVID-19 has had devastating effects, we currently face the threat of far more deadly pandemics.
Sick care is costly because it focuses on the already sick when interventions are expensive and outcomes are poor. In contrast, Preemptive Health aims to protect, maintain and improve health rather than waiting for people to become sick.
The goal of “Preemptive Health” is to serve people before they become patients, adding years to life and life to their years.
Preemptive Health is a new field, distinct from today’s medicine.And while it shares the same goals with traditional public health, it is about the application of leading-edge biological sciences and digital technology to existing health goals.
Achieving our Preemptive Health aspiration will require engagement and participation by many partners across the private and public sectors, research and academia.
Related Companies
Several Flagship-founded companies are advancing these efforts from early cancer detection to identifying novel predisease biomarkers to neutralizing infections pathogen threats.
Apriori Bio is working to create a world where humanity is protected against viral threats. The company’s pioneering approach centers on its unique technology platform, Octavia™, which allows Apriori to survey the entire landscape of existing and potential viral variants to design new vaccines and antibody drugs against the most threatening variants.
Harbinger Health is pioneering the detection of early cancer and enabling foundationally new approaches to cancer screening, diagnosis and management. The company combines advances in artificial intelligence with proprietary insights into the biology of the beginnings of cancer to identify cancer before it is visible or symptomatic with the aim of developing accessible blood-based tests. Harbinger envisions a future where, instead of keeping cancer from spreading, it could be kept from forming, making a cancer diagnosis a routine health problem to be addressed rather than a life-altering event to be feared with profound implications for people, healthcare systems and societies.
Founded as Seventh Sense Biosystems in 2011, YourBio Health has designed and developed TAP™, the world’s first push-button blood collection device. It makes the process simple, convenient, and painless. The company aims to create a new standard for blood collection that increases patient compliance with testing orders, leading to faster diagnoses and better outcomes. Future versions of TAP will be designed to enable patients to collect their own blood anywhere.
Montai Health is pioneering the creation of Anthromolecule™ medicines – unlocked from a privileged class of molecules with a history of safe, human consumption — to treat and preempt chronic disease. Montai’s CONECTA™ Platform couples advancements in the digitization of natural chemistry and human biology with powerful computational tools to evaluate millions of bioactive Anthromolecule connections to validated disease pathways, and efficiently prioritize high potential hits to develop a robust product pipeline.
