A Healthy Partnership

Credit: Kouzou Sakai

Rendering a complete picture of a person’s health would offer something like a master key to unlock information about the treatments and interventions to best help a patient. This is what’s called precision medicine, and traditionally, the health profile draws on genetic details, information from biological tests and lifestyle and environmental factors.

But what about personal stories? Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin are now teaming up with partners at Tec de Monterrey, a Mexican university, to apply a sophisticated combination of new AI technologies, biomedical data and old-fashioned story collection. Two faculty members from UT’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, Elizabeth Muñoz and Mateo Farina, are working to uncover links between people’s life experiences and chronic conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes. Theirs is one of the first projects through OriGen Health Research Center, a cross-border initiative that leverages UT’s strengths in machine learning and Tec’s unique database of genetic and clinical data in the largest biobank in Latin America. All OriGen projects aim to help solve entrenched health challenges in both countries, like obesity and cancer.

Muñoz, Farina and the team are conducting a life history survey with Mexican adults whose data is already in the biobank. They hope to be able to tease out from hundreds of these surveys the ways that people’s experiences earlier in life – ranging from childhood adversity to divorce to migration – interacts with biology in ways that elevate the risk of diabetes and heart conditions. If successful, the initiative will pinpoint hidden drivers of cardiometabolic health and support healthy aging in people living in the Americas and across the globe.