Big data quantitative analysis toolkit

Just like data bytes may become much more richly modulated with attributes (an extension of data provenance; modulating data bytes with additional inspectable elements such as create/review/launch time stamps, and owner, quality, freshness, and controversy properties, etc.), so too may quantitative data sets.

There should be a ‘2.0 format’ standardized toolkit for quantitative data analysis that includes the top ten techniques often used to analyze data sets. These tools should be user-friendly, ideally as a widget overlay to websites, or otherwise easily accessible and usable by non-quant laypersons.

Suggested techniques for inclusion in the top ten most-useful data analysis tools:

1. Fourier transforms
2. Markov state models
3. Entropy analysis
4. Distribution analysis (e.g.; power law, Gaussian, etc.)
5. Progression analysis (e.g.; linear, geometric, exponential, discontinuous)
6. Qualitative math
7. Network node/group theory/graphing theory analysis
8. Complexity, chaos, turbulence, and perturbation modeling
   

It could become standard that these kinds of techniques are automatically run and displayed on large data sets.

Mental performance optimization

Much time is devoted to maintaining physical health through exercise but almost nothing is done to maintain mental health. The positive psychology movement, happiness research, persuasive behavioral change techniques, calming technologies, and books such as the Neuro Revolution have helped to destigmatize mental health as a focal point for improvement. The next big wave in mental health and performance optimization could come from mobile phone apps. The continuous intimate experience with these inseparable human appendages makes them perfect tools for managing mental health.

The first generation of mental performance mobile apps has been mainly for data collection. Subsequent generations could extend into targeted interventional strategies and ongoing performance management. NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques could be used to shift attention to productive areas, shape goals and action steps, reframe unpleasant experiences, identify and bring out internal resources, and otherwise facilitate better feelings and experiences.

Citizen science health tools

The number of citizen science health and biology projects has been growing in the last few years due to a confluence of factors. Some of these include the plummeting cost of DNA sequencing, the availability of bioinformatics and other web-based data interpretation tools, the possibility of ordering direct-to-consumer blood tests, and having community DIYbio labs for experimentation, education, and support. DIYgenomics has developed a number of boilerplate tools to help in the design and conduct of citizen science health projects:

Study design and organization

• Study design template

Legal/ethics

• Sample informed consent form

Finance

• Study budget template

Recruitment and marketing

• Study flyers: multiple studies, aging study, vitamin deficiency study
• Conference poster
• Participant recruiting plan (per Genomera)
  

Quantization trends of the future: crowdsourcing and geolocation

Two conferences held in San Francisco last week underline key future trends, the crowdsourcing of work (and maybe everything), and hyper-local mobile-phone based services such as payments. Thematically, crowdsourcing and mobile services both deal with quantization – the idea of resources being granularized to the smallest unit, and then directed fungibly and automatically to where they are needed and requested, like routing internet data packets. In this case labor units and targeted personalized mobile services can be delivered on a quantized basis. Market principles continue to seep into life with quantization models which typically provide superior value creation and exchange.

Crowdsourcing
CrowdConf2011 (November 1-2, 2011) was bigger and broader than CrowdConf2010. The main focus continued to be on crowdsourced labor, but these models are also emerging in e-government, consumer travel, entertainment, fundraising, and philanthropy (and health, though not included at CrowdConf). Software, professional services (i.e.; graphic design) and R&D have long been staples of crowdsourced labor, and these models are now being extending to almost all areas of the enterprise including sales, social CRM (customer relationship management) and finance, accounting, and administration.

Mobile-phone based services
Mobile is the platform. One billion smartphone users are expected by 2013 and app downloads grew explosively from 300 million in 2009 to five billion in 2010. Arguably, the mobile phone has become an indispensable human augmentation accessory: the loss of a phone is noticed within five minutes, versus the loss of a wallet which takes an hour. The intimate continuous connection individuals have with their mobile phones suggests the platform as a critical delivery mechanism for many important future services such as mental mood performance optimization.

Geo-Loco (November 3, 2011) focused on hyper-local mobile services delivery. The biggest growth area is mobile payment programs where the prevailing methods in use are 2-D barcodes (as used in Starbucks smartphone apps) and NFC (near field communication) chips which send encrypted data over short distances. The development of corporate and brand marketing strategies for mobile services delivery was another big focal area. The poster-child of success of branded smartphone apps, from Starbucks, allows payments, store locating, and checking nutritional information. Ironically, drinks can be configured out of 85,000 possibilities and shared with friends, but not actually ordered!

Job of the near-future: health advisor

The health advisor is analogous to the financial advisor or mortgage broker that arose last decade when it became possible to trade stocks and get mortgage quotes on the internet. This advisor is familiar with the whole ecosystem of services and service providers in a sector whether finances, home buying and selling, or in this case, personalized health management.

The health advisor designs comprehensive wellness plans that integrate multiple health data streams such as family history, personal health history, genomics, and eventually microbiomic, proteomic and metabolomic profiles. The health advisor would recommend what type of genomic sequencing to sign up for (for example, 23andMe genotyping or Illumina whole human sequencing) and interpret the results and suggest action items. The health advisor would recommend and administer self-tracking programs and gadgets for diet, nutrition, medication and supplementation, exercise, and sleep management. The health advisor would recommend clinical trials or crowdsourced health studies that might be relevant for individuals to join. The health advisor could be compensated with pre-tax HSA (health savings account) dollars or other tax-advantaged funds.

This is a job category of the near future, as health advisor certification programs and wellness coaches are already arising.

Advances in translational antiaging skin research

There are many exciting innovations in translational anti-aging skin research. Personalized genomics is an important emerging field of science being applied to human biology with applications in skin disease risk assessment, wellness profiling, and product response customization.

Simultaneously, there are promising anti-wrinkle remedies being commercialized such as cellular therapies, topical treatments, retinoid and botox substitutes, and advances in skin manufacturing initially developed by the military for battlefield healing are starting to be applied to the aesthetic dermatology market, for example, dermal substitutes, next-generation skin grafting, and spray-on skin.

Excerpted from Translational antiaging skin research.

Complement proteins: possible predictive biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease

Recent research has uncovered more details about how the brain works. As brains develop, the many initially-formed synapses get pruned. How this occurs is important to understand as synapse pruning also occurs in neurodegenerative disease.

In synapse pruning, many mechanisms are operating together in a systems biology fashion, but one key dynamic is that protein molecules (complement proteins C1q and C3) are tagging weak synapses for elimination. For example, complement protein molecules are massively upregulated in Alzheimer’s disease. The Cq1 genes have been shown to come on very early in the case of glaucoma and are proposed to be a global dynamic of synaptic loss in neurodegenerative disease (e.g.; Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, ALS, etc.).

The early and prominent role of complement genes and proteins suggests the possibility of measuring them as a predictive biomarker of neurodegenerative disease.

Steady advance of stem cell therapies

Stem cell research and related therapies (including regenerative medicine and cellular therapies) is an industry with a strong possibility of having a significant near-term impact on worldwide public health. One reason is the industry’s linkage between policy, science, industry, and patient advocacy, as was clear in the attendance and programming at the 7th annual World Stem Cell Summit held in Pasadena CA, October 3-5. Other science-driven fields such as synthetic biology, nanomedicine, and aging might benefit from cultivating such a multi-disciplinary perspective. Stem cell therapies are useful not only in cell-replacement therapies, but also in disease modeling, drug discovery, and drug toxicity screening.

Disease therapeutics and clinical trial focus
Stem cell therapies are currently being applied to over 50 diseases particularly in the areas of heart, lung, neurodegenerative, and eye disease, and cancer and HIV. Dozens of companies are developing therapeutic solutions which are in different stages of clinical use and clinical trials. Some high-profile therapies include Dendreon’s Provenge for prostate cancer, Geron’s first-ever embryonic stem cell trials for spinal cord injury, Fibrocell’s laViv cellular therapy for wrinkles, and well-established commercial skin substitutes (Organogenesis’s Apligraf and Advanced BioHealing’s Dermagraft).

Policy
Stem cell policy issues under consideration include medical tourism, standards for large-scale stem cell manufacturing, and lingering ethical debates over the use of embryonic stem cells.

Science
Contemporary stem cell science advances include a focus on techniques for the direct reprogramming of cells from one lineage to another without having to return to pluripotency as an intermediary step, improved means of generating and measuring induced pluripotent cells, and progress in approaches to neurodegenerative disease, for example establishing causal factors for early-onset Parkinson’s disease, generating neuronal cells and dopaminergic cells, and neural stem cell lumbar implantation clinical trials.

Blood Tests 2.0 advances with dried blood spot testing

Moving into an era of preventive medicine and health self-hacking, blood tests 2.0 is an obvious area for expected innovation, moving whole classes of blood tests from $100+ lab-administered arm draws to fingerstick tests conducted at home. One of the most promising techniques for realizing blood tests 2.0 is dried blood spot (DBS) testing. From a biochemistry perspective, the volume of blood taken in a serum draw is not required for many tests; a few drops would be adequate for many tests. Some exciting recent progress in dried blood spot testing was announced with NanoInk’s protein biomarker detection platform, based on dip pen nanolithography, which was used to identify and quantitate four clinically-relevant cytokines. The technology cannot detect everything, but could possibly be used to identify hundreds of proteins, and pave the way for low-cost home blood marker monitoring.

Home-administered fingerstick tests are already available for several markers, although the cost is not necessarily cheaper and a health care professional may still need to be involved. Blood spots from a fingerstick are placed on filter paper to dry and then sent to a lab for analysis. Tests are available for vitamin D, hormone levels (including estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, and cortisol), cardiometabolic markers (including insulin, high sensitivity C-reactive protein, total, HDL and LDL cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c, and triglycerides) from ZRT Labs. Theoretically, dozens of blood tests could be re-invented as fingerstick tests that are self-administered and interpreted in easy diagnostic readers or mobile-phone attached sensors.

Robotic benefits could accelerate into the service and software industries

An animated discussion about the future of robotics occurred at the September 24, 2011 Boulder Colorado Future Salon. One claim is that the last few decades in robotics might be analogous to the status of the computing industry in the 1950-1970s, growing slowly but surely, and suggesting that the pervasiveness and impact of robotics could start to accelerate. There has been significant progress in agricultural automation and factory automation, and this could spread rapidly to service industries and information technology industries.

On the one hand this is the next logical step in fulfilling the ongoing human dream of using technology to provide more free time. On the other hand, while so far robotics has not had a big negative impact on jobs, a more rapid move to automation in more sectors could result in a more significant displacement of human capital.

Industries of the future
There is a tremendous opportunity to identify the industries of the future and start them. Future industries could be clustered by areas such as sustenance (food, energy, and clean resources), health, productive activity, entertainment, and well-being. One obvious group of future technologies will focus on food, for example, vertical farming and lab-grown meat. Mental well-being and enhancement is virtually untapped, although there is some preliminary activity in applying behavioral change and happiness research, and calming technologies. Some key dynamics that govern human behavior will not be going away in the short-term such as the demand for status-garnering and reputation-building (why gaming has been so successful), so industries providing opportunities for this would be well-pitched.