The next generation of medicine won’t be built around treating disease after it appears. It will be built around understanding precisely how disease develops — and predicting its course to enable precise interventions before it becomes irreversible.
That vision united researchers from Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Old Dominion University at the inaugural Biomedical Research Diamond symposium in Richmond, where scientists described advances spanning neuroscience, cancer, rare diseases, cardiovascular and metabolic health, immunology, artificial intelligence, and drug discovery.
Although the diseases differed, the scientific strategy was consistent: understand the biology, identify the mechanisms that drive disease — and those that promote health and longevity such as exercise and nutrition — and use that knowledge to develop more precise interventions at the molecular, cellular, and systems levels…