In his Inaugural Lecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) on 7 November, Ferenc Krausz announced the start of a long-term strategic partnership of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF) in Budapest and the University of Hong Kong (HKU) with the aim to jointly create the basis for transforming healthcare: toward personalized precision prevention. Their protecting.health Global Initiative is open for further institutions to join in.
Every year, 17 million people under the age of 70 die of – and many more lose their ability to work due to – noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and chronic respiratory disorders. Most of these premature deaths would be preventable by early detection and timely intervention. In their absence, developed countries spend enormous resources on treatment of progressed NCDs and lose enormous resources due to the loss of workforce. The lack of these resources implies a dramatically reduced healthy life span in low- and middle-income countries. A shift from the current predominantly reactive to a future primarily preventive care promises a sustainable long-term solution.
Drawing on transformative breakthroughs in physical technologies, biomedical developments, and artificial intelligence
The protecting.health Global Initiative based in Budapest, Hong Kong and Munich aims at establishing the foundations for precision preventive healthcare of the future.
The Initiative is based on a unique longitudinal cohort study design, briefly: the protecting.health study design for the discovery and validation of a molecular dataset enabling screening for the most common NCDs. The prototypical protecting.health study is under way in Hungary (h4h.hu) and will be initiated in Hong Kong and in Germany soon.
The collected blood plasma samples will be analyzed in the protecting.health phenotyping center by using state-of-the-art molecular profiling technologies to establish and validate a comprehensive set of pre-symptomatic biomarkers for a range of NCDs from blood plasma. The resultant biomarker panel along with diagnosed outcomes will be used to train - by latest-generation AI - the protecting.health/screening-algorithm, briefly: PH1.0, for providing early information about previously undetectable onset of cardiovascular disorders (heart attack, stroke) and slowly progressing diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
This way, protecting.health will develop a cross-ethnic and cross-age health screening procedure for capturing chronic conditions at their earliest stages, allowing timely intervention and/or lifestyle changes for curing them or preventing them from progressing toward life-threatening disorders. This will result in profound societal and economic benefits: more healthy years of life for those affected, significantly reducing the burden on the healthcare system and – through an extended active lifespan – significantly strengthening economic power. A threefold contribution to sustainable prosperity.
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