Ten years from now, you will not have to spend hours in a doctor's office to complete a comprehensive health checkup. Instead, with just a single pin-prick, a nanotechnology device will quickly measure and analyse 1,000 proteins in a droplet of your blood. Based on this "molecular fingerprint", your doctor will prescribe drug regimens tailored to your personal state of health that will not only be able to reverse many diseases, but will also prevent their manifestation in the first place. That, at least, is how Leroy Hood, the president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology, a non-profit organisation based in Seattle, lays out the future of medicine. "The Human Genome Project has given us a parts list," he explains. The next step is to capture the information from all the elements in a biological system: DNA, proteins, cells and organs, and then create new mathematical models that will represent the relationships between them. The ensuing digitisation of biology, he reckons, will revolutionise the entire health-care system and usher in a new era of predictive, preventive and personalised medicine.
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