London. 14 November 2022. The National Innovation Centre for Ageing and Collider Health launch the Quantum Healthy Longevity Innovation Mission with a keynote by Lord Bethell, former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Technology, Innovation and Life Sciences, to shift ‘sickcare’ to a new model based on proactive prevention, with the ever-growing recognition that wealth of nations is not possible without the health of populations.
We need healthcare not sickcare
It is no longer possible to afford a healthcare system based only on response to illness. Society needs citizens to be more aware and supported in their health and behavioural choices across the life course, as well as a productive workforce equipped to respond to ongoing challenges and stresses. In response, leaders are coming together to radically reimagine short, medium and long-term responses at a global, societal and individual level and significantly invest in an interdependent ecosystem for science and innovation to accelerate healthy longevity at quantum scale and pace [1].
As we are progressively seeing with research on the psychology, sociology and biology of ageing, age-related chronic diseases are not inevitable or untreatable. We need to take a multipronged ‘whole of life’ approach to tackle all the different but interacting drivers of health and disease – lifestyle factors, including diet and physical activity, socioeconomic determinants, such as discrimination, early and lifelong education, training and skills, financial status, and social support; and, increasingly, the characteristics of physical environments, such as green spaces and air quality, need more attention. In particular, continuous interactions with and cumulative exposures to the surrounding physical and social environments throughout life have vital roles in later-life outcomes.
The Quantum Healthy Longevity blueprint aims to harness such opportunities, address urgent needs and fulfil aspirations of the UK Innovation Strategy to tackle big, real-world problems in climate and health, by harnessing developments in the understanding of the exposome, the system of all external factors that influence our health and wellbeing trajectory [2].
We are on the cusp of transformational change with technologies that can give a massive step change in delivering healthy longevity for all, taking advantage of the UK’s unique strengths such as the world’s largest longitudinal cradle-to-grave dataset from NHS healthcare records. Insights from data outside the NHS dataset, such as genetics, biological, behavioural, social, environmental and financial data are also under-utilised and there are significant opportunities to use AI and multimodal learning to predict disease and incentivise healthier living using ‘life data’.
The mission aims to unlock the innovation economy and help drive UK’s aspirations to be a science and technology superpower, including helping biotech investment move from 2.0 (investing in ‘sickcare’) to 3.0 (investing in prevention) and leveraging the immense potential of intelligence to create the world’s leading test bed for health, powered by public and private sector investment to increase healthy longer lives for everyone.
“The time has come for action: to harness and develop a shared intelligence combining the intelligence of people, the intelligence of research and business, and the intelligence of data to transform what we all already know and accelerate what we have yet to understand about what impacts us across the course of our lives. At NICA we framed our mission in ‘adding intelligence to ageing and longevity’ and this is our contribution to the Quantum Healthy Longevity Mission, hoping that the many outstanding UK and international entities will join us to take the steps necessary for a quantum leap forward” said Nic Palmarini, Director of the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing.
“There is clear citizen demand for this. People are incredibly enthusiastic about the endless possibilities of science, technology and innovation and how this investment can massively help people and planet. But they want action – and more, more join up, less waste. They want to see solutions based on what they need, that they can afford and that can help them know what to do to live healthier better lives” said Professor Lynne Corner, COO of the National Innovation Centre for Ageing and Director of VOICE.
“The Mission takes an exponential approach leveraging data from the ‘exposome’ – reflecting the external stresses and factors that influence our health- to understand how best humans can flourish in their environments. The abundance of data that can be captured and analysed on how we behave and respond means we can better understand the complex patterns that link our environment, behaviours and health and yield critical insights into the underlying causes of age-related diseases- including dementia, the disease many of us fear most.” Says Tina Woods, CEO of Collider Health and Healthy Longevity Champion for the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing.
Literature
[1] Woods, T; Palmarini N, Corner L et al. Quantum Healthy Longevity for healthy people, planet and growt. Lancet Healthy Longevity November 13 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S2666-7568(22)00267-7
[2] Christopher Paul Wild; Complementing the Genome with an “Exposome”: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 1 August 2005; 14 (8): 1847–1850. https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-05-0456.
You can find more information here: https://issuu.com/nationalinnovationcentreforageing/docs/quantum_brochure_v.0.2_print
Please contact Tina Woods on [email protected] for more information.