A conversation with Lee Hood on The Human Phenome Initiative and the next frontier in biomedical research
On April 23, FAS held a workshop on moonshots for science which included a Q&A with Lee Hood, the CEO of Phenome Health where he proposed that the next audacious “moonshot” in biomedical research be The Human Phenome Initiative. This focused effort will develop clinically-validated actionable possibilities that improve health or facilitate early disease detection. The Initiative will also develop technologies necessary to measure more of what is going on in our bodies to enable a shift in medicine from largely diagnosis and treatment (i.e., ‘disease-care’) to one where wellness and chronic disease avoidance are dominant.
Lee is a pioneer in biomedical research and early leader in the Human Genome Project. Lee co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology, is the recipient of the National Medal of Science, the Lasker Award, and the Kyoto Prize. He has co-founded 17 biotech companies including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Rosetta, and Arivale, and is one of only 20 people elected to all three National Academies. In 2026 Forbes selected him as 41st among the 250 most innovative, living Americans. He currently serves as the CEO of Phenome Health, a non-profit research organization focused on developing the tools that power data-driven personalized health.
MS. What does it take for a moonshot to be successful and how did you see this play out during the Human Genome Project?
LH. The Human Genome Project is a great example of a moonshot that required government coordination and support and resulted in a fundamental shift in our understanding of biology and genetic diseases. In essence it provided for each individual the upper and lower limits of their trajectories. One’s phenotype from birth to death is determined primarily by their personal behavior and environment—which can be assessed by quantification of blood proteins, metabolites and clinical chemistries, the gut microbiome and digital health devices for body and brain—examples of measurements of the “phenome”. In many ways it created the modern biotechnology industry and provided an absolutely staggering economic return on investment of several orders of magnitude. Most people don’t know that it was originally initiated by the Department of Energy.
MS. What do you see as the government’s primary role in moonshots and why is that important?
LH. The government’s primary roles in moonshots are to coordinate government, academic, and private sector leaders to develop goals for the effort, drive participation, and to coordinate to ensure that the goals are reached on budget and ahead of schedule. It is important that people understand that while there may be an overarching goal–going to the moon is the clearest example–there are actually a series of shorter-term clear goals that must be developed, financially supported, and coordinated across the effort. Without coordination and financial support, it is extremely difficult to keep a series of discrete efforts focused and on schedule. A key point is that with government support the data from the Human Phenome Initiative is open and available to all, academics, industry, healthcare systems and other interested parties. This is critical to maintaining U.S.’s leadership in healthcare, biotechnology, and many academic departments.
MS. Looking to the future, what do you think is the next moonshot in biomedicine?
LH. The future of biomedicine is crystal clear. I started calling it P4 medicine, which stands for Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory. In essence, if we can measure and collect far more data from people from blood, for example, in a typical doctor’s office visit, we can start to develop real signatures of health trajectories (e.g., biological age, biological BMI, frailty, immunity and brain cognition) and know precisely what is going on in an individual and thereby use an individual’s own data to tailor unique treatment for each person. When we do this for a large population of people, we can slowly shift medicine from diagnosis and the treatment of disease to optimizing individual wellness, avoiding disease and extending one’s healthspan into the 90s or beyond. People will be healthier longer. That will save the country trillions of dollars in disease treatment as they steer clear of chronic disease. And it will add significantly to the workforce with physically healthy and mentally agile individuals This is what wellness is all about.
We call it the Human Phenome Initiative because the goal is to be able to measure what is going on in the human body at any given time with far more fidelity than we can now. We need to understand the phenome. To achieve this, we must take decisive steps that require moonshot-like coordination of efforts and set a goal of understanding what is going on in the human body at a molecular level using systems-biology and AI-driven approaches to individual data. First, we need new technologies that can measure more molecules in the blood of people and lower the cost of measuring proteins, metabolites, the gut microbiome and digital health devices so it can be cost effective in the clinic. This is akin to what we did with genome sequencing. The first human genome sequence was estimated to cost a billion dollars, but now it costs around $100 to have your genome sequenced. We need the same focused efforts on building technologies that can make phenomic measurements throughout the body and blood. Next we need to take advantage of some of the already existing large cohort studies and offer participants the possibility of knowing and deploying “actionable possibilities” derives from their own data—to improve their health and to insure they stay in the program long term.
MS. Why is now the moment to launch this effort?
LH. This really is a unique moment for the country to launch the Human Phenome Initiative. First, we have an administration that has set a fantastic goal of making Americans healthier—focusing on wellness and disease prevention. That really can’t be done without having more data on what is going on in our bodies and better understanding how to bend human behavior towards healthier lifestyle choices. Second, we are at the dawn of a new era with AI. But the use of AI in medicine is always going to be limited by the data that can be used to train them. For us to really make the best use of AI to understand health and biological complexity at a much deeper level, we need a tremendous amount of new data on what is going on in humans. It can’t be done with just data from electronic health records and wearables. We simply need to know what is going on in the human body at a molecular, imaging, environmental and personal behavior levels. Once we have data from a large and diverse cohort of people, we will be able to get real signatures or trajectories of health that can empower people with personalized health information which, in turn allows them to make specific lifestyle choices. And finally, if we don’t launch an effort to do this soon, we will lose a compelling opportunity to be the leaders in a health revolution—transforming healthcare from our current ‘sick care’ to a future of wellness and disease prevention. If we don’t do it, other countries will. China is already driving in this direction and I would hate to see the U.S. pass on an opportunity to lead in the innovation breakthroughs that are going to redefine both medicine and healthcare.
MS. OK, so the key to driving a sea change in medicine is going to be a plethora of new data that tell us what is going on in the human body at a given time. Walk me through how metascience plays a part.
LH. Metascience is going to be a critical part of any program that intends to upend an entrenched system, in this case, medicine. Based on individual data from the Human Phenome Initiative, wearables, electronic health records, clinical trials, blood analytes, the gut microbiome and more, we will be able to ask real questions on standards of care at an individual level, clinical trial design, behavioral regimens and more. It is not just medicine that is going to be upended, it is how we even study medicine, health, healthcare, and disease that are going to be radically transformed based on understanding what is going on in the bodies of patients and clinical trial participants. We are going to look back on the way we do biomedical research today as if it was the stone age.
MS. What can the public expect in terms of returns on investment if the Human Phenome Initiative is launched?
LH. One really novel aspect of The Human Phenome Initiative is that new insights into health will be returned to participants as prioritized actionable possibilities so they can immediately start benefiting from their participation in the study. This is very different from the way most studies are designed where participants rarely hear back news of findings that can help them directly. That creates a really dynamic system where participants learn about their health and can take action to improve it while the study is ongoing. We will then be able to see how receiving that information transforms their health trajectories. That is new and exciting and has never been done for a large cohort study.
This kind of public investment will turn healthcare on its head. As we develop new signatures of health and interventions to stave off chronic disease, healthcare will transform from an enterprise focused on billing codes for diagnosing and treating disease to a system that empowers people based on their own health data to live healthier longer. As I mentioned earlier, the future will be 4P Medicine— that is, a healthcare system that is Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory. Your health trajectory will be powered by data from you and insights will be driven by the collective data and insights from millions of other people. That is a revolution worth getting behind. A critical driver of this will be AI which will have the capacity to discover, delineate clinical support and deliver to patients and their doctors the individual prioritized actionable possibilities that will enhance wellness, prevent disease and expand one’s healthspan into the 90s. AI will make individual physicians domain experts in most fields of medicine and will provide them with the ability to treat patients as never before been possible.
At a macro level, the return on investment will be an explosion of new services and companies that will be able to take an evidence-based approach to guiding your health based on what is going on yin your body. As I mentioned, the Human Genome Project drove an economic return on investment of several orders of magnitude—for a $3 billion dollar investment, the Battelle Organization calculated 10 years after the project was finished it returned $800 billion—a striking ROI. The Human Phenome Initiative will dwarf that in both economic growth through new industries but will also save us extraordinary amounts of money by having people steer clear of chronic disease that represents the majority of our healthcare expenditures each year. The U.S. spend over $5 trillion dollars on healthcare each year and 86% of it is focused on chronic diseases. If we can steer even a small percentage of the population from developing a chronic disease, it will pay for itself in no time at all.
Right now, the wellness industry is in its infancy. People are taking supplements and using wearables to try to improve their health, but often that is based on wide generalizations without really understanding in detail what is going on in your own body. The good news is that people are interested in maintaining and improving their health. We just need to develop the technologies and systems to provide a more solid evidence-based possibilities for creating and delivering health trajectories with actionable recommendations based on what is actually going on in your body.
MS. Why can’t the private sector and academic community just move forward and do this?
LH. In a sense, some parts of the Human Phenome Initiative are happening now just like there were scientists studying genomes before the Human Genome Project. What is needed is broad coordination and support that can only come from the government. We need a coordinated federal blueprint for The Human Phenome Initiative, including targeted investments to be made by federal agencies in support of the development of technologies and research that meet the goal of creating the data needed to be able to really use AI to get actionable insight into health at a far greater scale than possible today. We need those investments to not just develop the technologies to measure more in people, proteins and metabolites in blood, in particular. We need a coordinated effort to drive all of the genome and phenome data to academic and private sector researchers so we can unleash the U.S. innovation machine on changing medicine. Without that data from a large group of people, we are really going to be limited as to what AI can do for healthspan and wellness. This gives us the possibility of N=1 medicine—where each individual is treated precisely in an optimized, systems-driven manner.
We sat down with biomedical research pioneer Lee Hood to talk moonshots, metascience in medicine, and the Human Phenome Initiative.
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