At the beginning of the conversation, Dr. Stewart shares what drew him to his sphere of work, and where he thinks we are currently in the industry of individualized medicine through genome sequencing. He believes that we are still in the earliest days of this branch of medicine, which is certain to evolve tremendously over the next few decades.

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Dr. Stewart would rather focus on prevention and maintenance of a ‘healthy genome’ in people that still haven’t developed a significant illness by using personalized medicine.

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At the Mayo Clinic they have moved from diagnosing and treating diseases to using genomics to predict and prevent. This especially applies to diseases directly related to the genome, such as cancer, leukemia, lymphomas, and various rare hereditary diseases that are hard to diagnose.

 

Dr. Stewart and other team members from at the Mayo Clinic are also involved in the ‘All of Us’ project, aimed at sequencing the genome of one million Americans as a part of a longitudinal study on big sample genome state. The purpose of the project is to find ways to improve the health of the nation. He also shares some valuable information on Mayo Clinic GeneGuide, a personal genetic test that provides a wide array of information hiding in people’s genomes, such as proclivities for certain diseases, medication responses, health traits, and others. It offers a wealth of health knowledge that one can derive for themselves—knowledge that is usually hidden until too late. In this sense, Dr. Stewart believes that healthy people should also pay more attention to their genetic condition as a way to take better care and ambush potential negative developments in the future. At the Mayo Clinic they have plans to expand their scope of gene sequencing tremendously, in the numbers of hundreds of thousands of people.

 

According to the Dr. Stewart, it is becoming increasingly common to undertake genome sequencing tests as a preventive means to detect and treat potentially devastating diseases, but it is still not often enough to live up to its true potential. He believes that health insurance and other companies should do more to support routine testing in this manner, because the potential benefits are enormous compared to the costs.
 

Listen to the full episode above. 

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Download the full transcript here (pdf).

 

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