Personalisation and gene-level healthcare is becoming a mantra for healthy living of today and this trend is certainly here to stay

When it comes to healthcare of today, it seems taking tablets of over-the-counter vitamins or drinking eight glasses of water a day is no longer adequate.

To live healthily in this 21st century, doctors and the health conscious alike have put more focus on personalisation which will definitely be here to stay.

Spurred by the success of the Human Genome Project, a scientific approach designed to read human DNA sequence, gene-level healthcare — perhaps the clearest example of medical personalisation — has become increasingly popular.

The most recent and most controversial case is none other than the twin girls Lulu and Nana, the world’s first gene-edited babies, who became under the global spotlight late last year.

Through the technique called Crispr, which is an editing process to alter a gene in human embryos that is then implanted back in the womb of a woman, Lulu and Nana has the DNA that is resistant to HIV infection, meaning they would have no chance to be infected with the virus.

The person responsible for such a gene-editing project was Chinese scientist He Jiankui.

Of course, creating gene-editing babies triggered much public outcry later on, with people saying the technique was not ethically right.

Some fear that such a cutting-edge method would be a stepping stone for creating humans with desired intelligence, beauty and ability.

During the past several years, gene-level medical prevention has increasingly been implemented mostly through a method called carrier screening.

Simply put, it means one gets himself genetically tested to see if he is a carrier of any hereditary diseases.

In most cases, carrier screening is recommended for couples who are planning to have kids so that they can prevent bad, unhealthy genes to be passed onto their babies.

In June this year, an annual conference at the American Society for Nutrition revealed for the first time the result of a new study called Predict which is the world’s largest and most comprehensive analysis of individual responses to food.

Although it turned out that, after studying 1,000 subjects, genes play a limited role in diets, scientists did believe that they were closer to “being able to provide guidance for each person for what their ideal diet should be”. 

With medical scientists and researchers not just in Thailand and around the world putting more efforts into studying and practising individualised healthcare, it is without a doubt a big thing when it comes to healthy living.

New tech requires massive computing.

Cloud computing via user computers all around the world with usig blockchain and a kind of mining can solve this problem.

Another project from Stanford University which called Banano already implemented this method of computing for some kind of disease.

I guess that we will see more projects in 2 years which are focus to medical researches with blockchain based cloud computing.