Research
The Systems Biology Group, Inc. is dedicated to promoting a comprehensive set of non-pharmaceutical therapies capable of preventing, slowing, or in some cases reversing serious age-related illnesses. All these diseases are linked to elevated levels of chronic inflammation; many reflect mismatch between the prehistoric conditions in which humans evolved and the alien conditions of modern life.
A small sample of those illnesses includes ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and other inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs); diabetes type 2 and related metabolic disorders; all major bone and joint ailments; most forms of cancer in all stages, from initiation to progression and metastasis; atherosclerosis, stroke, and related cardiovascular disorders; Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and countless other neurological diseases including major depression, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia that in the past were often viewed as purely “psychological” conditions.
Recent work has also linked generalized inflammatory models of chronic disease to the origins of childhood diseases with key inflammatory components. Examples include early onset IBDs; diabetes type 1; serious asthma and other atopic conditions; and most childhood cancers. Each of these has been convincingly linked to accelerated biological aging and early mortality. Apparent causes in this case include multi-generational epigenetic inheritance along with dozens of toxic environmental influences on mothers, fetuses, and the newborn tied to the modern “exposome.”
Recent work in dozens of fields suggests that measures of low-grade system-wide inflammation at every stage of life are the most reliable markers of general health and remaining life expectancy. A key part of our work aims to make inexpensive home tests of such markers widely available, which provide biofeedback to extensive behavioral protocols aimed at helping users lower inflammatory drivers of accelerated aging using biofeedback to the anti-aging protocols
In our future pipeline: plans for a wearable medical device capable of monitoring key circulating inflammatory markers in real-time using advanced nano-sensor technologies.
Continuous monitoring of these markers will allow inexpensive lifelong tracking of the most reliable measures of healthy life span known — which if widely adopted could help maximize disease-free life expectancy given the right nutritional resources everywhere on the planet.
Aging and Non-Communicable Disease in a Global Context
“As of 2012, there were approximately 810 million persons age 60 years or older worldwide and the number is projected to grow to more than 2 billion by 2050.” (United Nations Population Fund.)
“Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 71% of all deaths globally….77% of all NCD deaths are in low- and middle-income countries.” (WHO factsheet on NCDs, 13 April 2021.)
The number of older adults planet-wide is growing at a stunning pace; the public health consequences of that growth are massive, since they include unprecedented rises in chronic diseases of aging on a scale capable of disrupting human societies even more than climate change or ecological decline and mass extinctions, to which those diseases are intimately linked.
Research by our Group suggests that adoption of a broad series of behavioral protocols based on evolutionary principles can help ameliorate this global crisis far more effectively than the use of grossly expensive “magic bullet” drug interventions — few of which have had any positive impact on health outcomes in poorer parts of the world.
With this in mind, our Group attempts to track every major medical and research development in immunological and age-related research as soon as it appears; this includes following studies that use high throughput technologies to model how aging affects, and is affected by, changes over time in chronic inflammation in different global populations.
Our core research mission is to translate this information into simple behavioral protocols designed to decrease disease risk and ameliorate the symptoms of dozens of major age-related diseases driven by modern drivers of low-grade inflammation,
Tracking Low-Grade Chronic Inflammation Life-Long
In sum, we believe that effective protocols in behavioral medicine can be guided by routine home tests of circulating inflammatory markers using biofeedback from those tests. The aim of this approach is to overcome sharp limitations on the effectiveness of treatments of non-communicable diseases using lab-made drugs. These limitations, based in part on non-deterministic sides of all molecular systems, make “precision medicine” in any real sense impossible even in theory — a topic that is discussed at length in a major paper-in-progress authored by our Group.