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WEP 2020—Week 2: Wrap-up

The Enrichment Office offers communication internships to students at KAUST during WEP.

This article was written by Ananya Ashok, student, Marine Science (Ph.D.)

The future we are progressing towards, as exhibited at WEP 2020, will be all about finding

tailored solutions to medical problems at various scales—molecular, individual, family and

population. Through the second week of WEP lectures, attendees learned that personalized

medicine is a complete package. It is the development of a drug as well as its delivery, and it

is as much a method of cure as it is a paradigm shift in viewing healthcare.

Personalized medicine is made possible by recognizing high-risk individuals and groups

through interpreting big and small data, identifying genetic factors and molecular mechanisms

responsible for illnesses and developing novel delivery mechanisms with the end goal of

customizing cure.

“Personalized medicine is not new. What is new today is the accuracy with which predictions

can be made,” stated Natasha McEnroe in her WEP keynote lecture about the history of

medicine.

Perhaps a physician in the time of Hippocrates would have known about illnesses running in

families, yet without knowing why or being able to tailor medical solutions to prevent such

diseases. In the time of “Personalized Medicine,” we are closer than ever to finding ways to

deliver this while overcoming new challenges.

February 16, 2020

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Eliminating the ‘one-size-�ts-all’ approach

Diseases are expensive. “Poor health costs not only individuals but [also] families, societies,

governments and entire nations,” said Harvard Professor Rifat Atun, introducing the concept of

“precision health.”

Finding and scaling up personalized solutions to populations is a unique challenge. In 2020,

the volume of health data generated worldwide will be 2,314 exabytes. All of this data can be

used to eliminate the one-size-fits-all approach by identifying demographic patterns in disease

vulnerability. Solutions could range from simply nudging risk groups towards healthier choices

through social media or building AI agent buddies for supporting chronically ill patients.

While precision health seems to be a critical solution, achieving this could be harder than

imagined. For example, healthcare delivery systems have seen very little innovation for

centuries now.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” Atun

concluded, calling for multi-level innovation.

The next level in personalizing medicine

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Regardless of risk groups, there is a high degree of individual variability that impacts the

outcome of treatments, as the audience learned from the WEP lecture by UCLA Distinguished

Professor Chih-Ming Ho.

Highlighting that, in a population, only one in four people responds as desired to

chemotherapy, Ho questioned, “How do we treat a patient without getting much data from

him?”

Data and AI provide the right tools to solve this problem, explained Ho. Molecular mechanisms

and systemic responses of diseases are different magnitudes. Because AI is mechanism-free, it

is possible to optimize a drug dose, while it could take forever to understand why it worked.

Ho’s team wanted to optimize the drug dosage. They did this by fitting dose responses of

patients to parabolic response surface (PRS) and deriving personalized coefficients. Fitting the

coefficients to an algebraic equation solved the problem of accuracy in drug dosage.

“Disease is personal. Treatment should be personal,” emphasized Ho.

Medicine may even be rocket science

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Thinking leads to innovation. Innovation to betterment. However, in a time where newer

challenges outcompete innovations, do we need something more?

A statement by Ho —“We have to come up with disruptive technology” —set the context for

Professor Mark Kendall’s talk on leaping towards personalized medicine. Kendall is also a

recipient of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

Medicine may not be all biology or chemistry—sometimes rocket science helps, too. Many of us

know is that the skin is our largest organ. This should be an incentive to understand the skin

better. Yet our drug delivery mechanism—injecting medicines into the surface of the skin—has

not changed in centuries, pointed out Kendall.

Applying principles of rocket mechanics to biology, Kendall inspired me to think differently.

Disruptive technology does not require thinking outside the box—it requires thinking without a

box.

Kendall studied why an injection plunger is sometimes ineffective. The answer, he discovered,

is the skin. He identified certain bundles of cells in the skin’s layers that prevented useful

needle entry and diffused the drug delivery. His team then developed the “Nanopatch,” which

revolutionizes the delivery of drugs by injection. Nanopatch is temperature stable and it costs

less than $1 each.

“This revolution is a complexity,” he said. “It’s a whole lot of things happening simultaneously.

We don’t know who the champion is going to be. Might as well be one of you in this room.”

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Even when medical technology is developed in a lab, it takes a sense of purpose to be able to

commercialize it, Kendall noted to the audience. In a place like KAUST, where research and

enterprise come together, this kind of innovation becomes possible.

Creating the future that we want through inspiration

In today’s world, we are witnessing many changes; for example, new chemical reactions, novel

diseases and many other issues that challenge humanity’s innovative thinking capacity.

We also have some incredible “living technology” that ranges from handheld genetic

sequencers to living mushroom lights to microbe mining kits and bionic implants. However, all

this might not be enough, said WEP speaker and science fiction writer Dr. Elsa Sotiriadis, who

claimed that through a chip implanted in her hand, she has become a cyborg. Today’s

technology facilitates the chip to tweet on her behalf, and in the future, it could do a lot more.

The greatest ability of the human mind is to imagine what does not yet exist. Our world today

was already imagined decades earlier by science fiction writers. Innovation commonly

underlies improving on existing conditions.

“We need a more powerful tool for the current scenario: science fiction,” said Sotiriadis.

By imagining what does not yet exist, we can propel our civilization forward. Companies and

tech institutions need to hire science fiction writers who imagine what’s beyond the frontier of

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current human innovative capacity, Sotiriadis stated. Some people imagine, some write, some

create and some revolutionize.

“We can take the future that is sold to us, or we can create the future we imagine,” she

concluded.

About WEP

The annual Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) is one of the hallmarks of KAUST. WEP is a two-

week program with the primary purpose of enriching and inspiring the University’s students

and KAUST community members, as well as academic and industrial partners and guests, who

are all invited to join the program.

All the keynote lectures and Sciencetown podcast interviews are available on YouTube.