These local researchers and doctors are trailblazers in precision health care

Imagine walking into your doctor’s office and getting a simple finger-stick blood test that is used to prescribe a personalized diet aimed at optimizing your health. 

The information is linked to your grocery delivery service, and all the ingredients are delivered directly to your doorstep. Sounds like supermarket sci-fi, right? But as Business Report writes in its latest issue, to Leanne Redman, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, this sort of scenario is more than just a fantasy. It’s a big-picture goal that drives Redman and her research team in their work with the National Institutes of Health-funded Nutrition for Precision Health initiative.

This $190 million project, which is being conducted at a consortium of 14 study sites around the country, aims to track the dietary intake of some 8,000 Americans and then analyze how participants’ genetics, lifestyles and other factors influence the way they respond to certain diets. Algorithms developed using these findings may ultimately allow health care providers to offer more customized nutrition recommendations.

Pennington’s Nutrition for Public Health project is just one local example of a global push toward personalized health care protocols that rely at least in part on genetic or molecular profiling.

Read the full story in Business Report’s latest Trends in Health Care edition.