Faculty profile: Nathan Price, PhD

Putting healthspan extension into hyperdrive

Here’s Nathan Price’s approach to science in a nutshell: “What I am is relentlessly future-oriented. I love seeing what’s the next possibility. I want to be in the fast lane, not the slow lane.” 

Price comes to the Buck as a professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan with a big-deal objective:  Change medicine from reactive “sick care” to proactive wellness by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to predict and prevent diseases, as the best way to give all of us more healthy years of life.  

“AI and machine learning are undergoing exponential growth, one that is faster than when the internet exploded in the mid-to-late 90’s,” Price says.  “We’re very much positioning the Center so that as AI makes exponential rises, we’re planning to be set up so that every increase in that power is very useful to what we’re trying to do for the health and wellness space. And we think that we can position our work in such a way that we’ll have unique ways to capture that.”

Price’s resume shows that he’s ready for the challenge. Specializing in systems biology, AI and bioengineering, Price has published more than 200 scientific papers and has been named one of 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine and is a member of the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He is co-author, with Buck Chief Innovation Officer and Distinguished Professor Lee Hood, of The Age of Scientific Wellness. The book sets forth the future of medicine as personalized, predictive, data-rich and “in your hands.”  The Center for Human Healthspan is where much of that scientific wellness will come to life.

The workflow of the Center is almost dizzying to contemplate. It will involve detailed profiling of the human phenome, which includes the physical and biochemical traits that make up an organism, and how those traits change over time (a big deal when it comes to aging). This profiling will include molecular assays and clinical data as well as social determinants of health and digital measures of environmental exposures and behaviors.  Multiple samples and data streams will be integrated to build a massive repository of biospecimens that will fuel biomedical research and discovery of both wellness and disease. Computational pipelines that apply cutting-edge AI and integrative, predictive modeling will power mechanistic discovery and biomarker identification. Therapeutics will be designed and preclinically validated before going into human clinical trials and ultimately into clinical practice. 

“I just think the most fun thing in science is to jump into something that is going in a direction that is super important. If it works out, you know it’s important,” Price says. “And if there’s a bunch of people telling you, ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ that’s where I want to be, because then I’m not in a lane where I’m going to get run over a bunch and by the time we’re years down the road, we’ll be the best in the world at it. That’s what I like.”

One of the goals of the Center for Human Healthspan is delivering value to society through commercialization and implementation of its discoveries and products. Price is also set up for success in that arena. He comes to the Buck with business experience as the Chief Scientific Officer of the healthy aging company Thorne. He was also a Professor and Associate Director at the Institute for Systems Biology, where he was co-director of the Hood-Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine, and an Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington in bioengineering and computer science. He received his PhD in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Price is busy establishing a new home base at the Buck, which he describes as the world’s foremost institute of aging. “It may sound like hyperbole, but I just feel like we’re going to go supernova because we have this really interesting and exciting convergence of basic science, these new technologies, new data and the new clinical research core at the Buck. I’m convinced we have the ability to make big differences in human health span, to reorient our healthcare system much more towards a wellness model”.

 “All of those things are incredibly huge, big societal challenges that are much bigger than me, much bigger than one institution but we can be a catalyst,” says Price, putting his comment in the context of one of his favorite quotes: Never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world. Indeed, nothing else ever has. “I think that is such a wise thing. I think that we have the chance at the Buck at this moment in time by being smart, strategic, and by tying into the right kinds of partners to catalyze real change in the trajectory of aging and health.”