NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Thorne and world-renowned scientific pioneers Drs. Joel Dudley and Chris Mason announced today the launch of Pillar Health, a revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) wellness platform that will provide an integrated molecular portrait and optimized actions for an individual’s health.
Enabled by an investment from Thorne, Pillar will leverage longitudinal sampling and in-depth measures of a person’s blood, genome, microbiome, metabolites, and environment to reveal altered or missing molecular components needed to accelerate wellness. These components of “precision wellness” can then be prioritized, customized, and ordered online for each individual. Drs. Dudley and Mason pioneered such AI-based adjustments for health and wellness in their research across hundreds of peer-reviewed papers.
Notably, Pillar will launch with millions of early-access customers through Thorne’s customer base of practitioners, elite athletes and consumers, as well as the corporate wellness customer network of WellnessFX. Pillar will work with New York City labs to provide genetic, microbiome, and metabolite tests, as well as new molecular measures of aging and skin health. Pillar will also leverage Thorne’s recently announced partnership with Drawbridge Health for Drawbridge’s expertise in novel blood sampling technologies that enable convenient and flexible testing.
Through Pillar Health, Drs. Mason and Dudley believe there is an internet-scale opportunity to put powerful precision health technologies into the hands of consumers to give rise to a new industry and era of science-based precision wellness.
“For years, we have built technologies and algorithms for monitoring health for very specialized patients in hospitals, and even for astronauts in space, but our new platform opens up the best-in-class of health and wellness to everyone and anyone,” Dr. Mason said. “It is each person’s right to know as much as possible about his or her wellness and health, right down to each base pair, methyl group, and molecule.”
“Converging technological advances at the nexus of molecular diagnostics, digital health, and artificial intelligence offer unprecedented opportunities to improve human health,” added Dr. Dudley. “For the past several years we have developed precision health technologies, which utilize intelligent, data-driven approaches that improve our ability to understand, diagnose, and treat disease, but thus far, precision health has been limited to the clinical realm and problems of manifest disease, and mainstream precision health efforts have yet to explore wellness and disease prevention.”
“We are laser-focused on translating impressive science into a great consumer user experience, but we also understand that companies cannot simply deliver reams of data to people, nor expect them to consistently turn over private information based on their own biomarkers without meaningful solutions,” said Thorne CEO Paul Jacobson. “Our companies, Thorne, WellnessFX and Pillar, will integrate everything and deliver it onto a single platform for actionable solutions.”
Pillar Health will be headquartered in New York City, where it will have the opportunity to leverage some of the world’s best scientific talent focused on shaping the consumer-driven healthcare system of the future.
“We believe New York City is a vastly under-utilized location for attracting internationally renowned health care entrepreneurs,” asserted Jacobson. “By running a lean operation based on early profitability and an ability to carefully select when and from whom we take money, we plan to become a magnet for great ideas, technologies, devices and products to solve many of the problems facing our healthcare system today.”
Pillar Health will allow consumers and patients to opt-in or out of data-sharing arrangements, and if they chose to allow the company to use their data in ways that generate additional economic value, Pillar will ensure that consumers share in any economic upside from their data.
“We intend to shake up the traditional model that allows companies to grow on the backs of their customers without sharing the wealth,“ said Dr. Dudley. “Our goal is to profit by improving your health, not by simply owning your data.”
About Thorne
Thorne is a health and technology company that is disrupting prevention and wellness. By combining dietary and lifestyle recommendations with nutritional supplement intervention, Thorne is at the forefront of personalized health, with a mission to help consumers take control of their own health and live a healthy life. Thorne provides at-home biomarker tests to bring the doctor to the consumer’s home. By leveraging its sophisticated analytical software, Thorne helps consumers uncover health insights and confidently take action to optimize healthier outcomes. Based on individual test results, Thorne’s technology and team can deliver a personalized plan on what to eat, how to exercise, and which Thorne supplements to take.
Thorne is the only supplement manufacturer to collaborate with Mayo Clinic on wellness research and content, and is the proud partner of a number of U.S. National Teams, including U.S. Soccer, USA Hockey, and USA Triathlon. Thorne is one of the fastest growing supplement companies, and is rated the top practitioner-dispensed brand among 30-40 year-olds. For more information visit https://www.thorne.com/.
About Joel Dudley
Dr. Dudley is currently Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Endowed Chair of Biomedical Data Science, and founding Director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Prior to Mount Sinai, he held positions as Co-founder and Director of Informatics at NuMedii, Inc. and Consulting Professor of Systems Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. His work published in >120 peer-review publications is focused at the nexus of -omics, digital health, artificial intelligence (AI), scientific wellness, and healthcare delivery. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, CNBC, and other popular media outlets. He was named in 2014 as one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine. He is co-author of the book Exploring Personal Genomics from Oxford University Press. Dr. Dudley received a BS in Microbiology from Arizona State University and an MS and PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University School of Medicine.
About Chris Mason
Dr. Christopher Mason is currently an Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, with appointments at the Tri-Institutional Program in Computational Biology and Medicine between Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center, and the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute. He is also Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, which bridges prediction methods in finance with genomics. His work spanning >140 peer-reviewed publications has been featured on the cover of Science, Nature, and Cell journals as well as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and other major media outlets. Dr. Mason was featured as a speaker at TEDMED and he was recognized in 2014 as one of the “Brilliant Ten” by Popular Science magazine. He completed his dual B.S. in Genetics and Biochemistry (2001) from University of Wisconsin-Madison, his Ph.D. in Genetics (2006) from Yale University, and then completed post-doctoral training in clinical genetics (2009) at Yale Medical School while jointly a post-doctoral Fellow of Genomics, Ethics, and Law at Yale Law School (2009).
About WellnessFX
WellnessFX provides consumers convenient direct access to comprehensive testing, thereby enabling individuals to assess and improve overall health and wellness. Through an intuitive desktop and mobile app, consumers can easily schedule blood, genetic and microbiome (coming in 2018) testing, understand the data, and choose consults with a variety of practitioners to review those results. Tracking those results over time allows consumers to establish a baseline, make lifestyle changes and easily monitor improvements in personal health and wellness. This same set of services is available to corporate partners through our employer wellness offering, empowering employers to help their employees improve health and wellness driving health care costs lower. For more information visit www.wellnessfx.com.
