Chris’ note: Legacy’s in-house tech expert, Jeff Brown, is no stranger to uncovering tech megatrends before they go mainstream.
But he’s not usually a test subject like he was in August… when he tried out an emerging approach to treat and prevent diseases. He recounts the whole experience below.
This new tech will revolutionize healthcare. And one company Jeff found in this sector is on the verge of curing one of mankind’s most devastating diseases. Once this news gets out, Jeff believes the company’s stock could soar up to 1,000% higher in a single day.
He’s hosting a special presentation next Wednesday, December 9, at 8 p.m. ET to share all the details. Reserve your free spot here to make sure you don’t miss out on this time-sensitive opportunity.
Now, over to Jeff.
What good is wealth if we don’t have our health to enjoy it?
That was the question on my mind in August when I traveled to La Jolla, California, to visit a company called Health Nucleus. From my perspective, it’s the future of healthcare.
It offers a lens to the future… not only for our health but for the future of the industry – a trend known as precision medicine. This is an emerging approach to treat and prevent diseases by considering each person’s genetic makeup, environment, and lifestyle.
In other words, it’s the opposite of what our healthcare system is today. And it’s a space I knew investors needed to be aware of.
Now, I often travel and engage in “boots-on-the-ground” research for my subscribers. But this time, my research was a bit different. Rather than a company or technology… the focus of my attention was me.
I flew to San Diego to put myself through tests and diagnostics so I could deeply understand what the future looks like. I was the one being poked and prodded this time.
And my crazy idea to go through this may very well have saved my life…
Checking in to Health Nucleus
I first learned about Health Nucleus back in 2014 when genetic-sequencing giant Illumina (ILMN) invested in a company called Human Longevity… the parent holding company of Health Nucleus.
Health Nucleus’ mission is straightforward: to evaluate the human condition from head to toe and compare that to a whole genome sequence – 3.2 billion base pairs of our DNA.
By doing so, it’s possible to map our genetic structure to our current or future conditions.
This is invaluable. It empowers us to understand our risk for disease, what kind of medications we’ll respond well to, and even medications that would have adverse effects on us due to our genetics.
Knowing these things in advance can be lifesaving. It also empowers us to adjust our lifestyle to avoid a “fate” we would otherwise face down the road.
The goal of my visit was simple – to bring my subscribers knowledge they would not otherwise have had. But I got a lot more out of the experience than I expected…
My day at Health Nucleus started with blood… lots of blood. I wasn’t even sure if I would have enough left to make it through the day.
After you fast starting the evening before, the first thing the team does is capture your blood. It’s a great way to get a snapshot of what your system looks like on any given day.
Providing one of many blood samples
But this isn’t the kind of blood test your family doctor orders to check on your cholesterol. It’s a completely different approach.
Rather than looking for a specific marker that might explain a symptom or checking if we have influenza A or B (or COVID-19, for that matter), the team at Health Nucleus looks for anything that may reveal something is wrong or even a bit off-kilter.
It tests more than 40 different blood biomarkers for things like kidney and liver function, insulin sensitivity, glucose levels, a detailed cholesterol panel, inflammation, hormones, vitamins, nutrients, heavy metals, prostate-specific antigen values, lipids, and more. The analysis even looks at more than 900 metabolites, which are what’s left over after the body has metabolized food.
When the results came back, I had nine detailed pages of analysis.
That bloodwork was followed by a full-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.
This isn’t something we would typically ever do. In a normal clinical environment, there would never be a reason to conduct a full-body MRI.
Conventional medicine offers no justification for imaging parts of the body with no symptoms. If we’re having terrible shoulder pain and can’t lift our arm above our head, the orthopedist orders a shoulder-specific MRI. The doctor will focus solely on where the symptom is presenting.
But at Health Nucleus, the goal is to take a very detailed, whole-body view to identify any concerns. And when I say detailed, I mean it.
A Tesla is the unit of measurement for the strength of the magnetic field of the MRI scanner. The typical MRI most of us experience uses a 1.5 Tesla machine. But the full-body MRI scan at Health Nucleus uses a 3 Tesla scanner. As a result, it produces incredibly clear images of our bodies.
Entering the MRI scanner
The imaging starts with a scan of the brain. The resolution enables the MRI to map out the brain’s blood vessels. The scan can find an aneurysm as small as 3 millimeters in diameter.
(My wife was convinced they would find something wrong up there… but I proved her wrong and received a glowing readout on my brain scan. Ha!)
After the brain, the process repeats for the cardiovascular system. The machine takes the equivalent of a high-definition video of the four chambers of the heart.
After the scan is complete, we can literally see our heart functioning. And the physicians can determine with remarkable accuracy how well our cardiovascular system is functioning.
Ultimately, the MRI produces a full-body analysis of our body composition. It can “see” how much muscle and fat we’re carrying.
We can understand with specificity how much subcutaneous fat (the fat visible under our skin) we have and how much visceral fat we’re “hiding” inside around our vital organs. Too much visceral fat is associated with cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and inflammation.
After the full-body MRI, it was time for my computed tomography scan (CT scan).
Lying inside the CT scanner
Health Nucleus’ CT scanners take X-ray images from many different angles. Then computers combine these images to create cross sections that allow us to see inside the body in a way we couldn’t with a normal X-ray.
This particular scan looks at the cardiovascular system. More specifically, it measures the amount of calcified plaque in the arteries of our heart.
This allows the team to quantify a coronary calcium score, a useful indicator of our cardiovascular health. In short, the more plaque this scan finds, the higher our risk of having a heart attack.
Next up were my echocardiogram and electrocardiogram (EKG).
The echocardiogram uses ultrasound to measure the size and shape of our heart. When used properly, it can accurately calculate the pumping strength of the left ventricle. It can also detect early signs of heart valve disease and any hypertrophy (thickening) of the heart muscle.
The EKG analyzes our heartbeat to determine if it’s irregular or too fast or slow. Measuring the electrical energy that travels through our heart is also a useful diagnostic for hypertrophy or fatigue.
Holding still for the EKG
My last major diagnostic test at Health Nucleus was a bone densitometry scan. This is also known as a DEXA, which stands for dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry.
The last test of the day, a bone densitometry scan
The DEXA collects a full “picture” of our body’s bone, fat, tissue, and muscle mass. It’s a fairly simple and effective tool for diagnosing osteoporosis and our risk for osteoporotic fractures.
If our bone mineral density is too low, the team at Health Nucleus can put a plan in place to improve bone strength and avoid an unwanted outcome.
Any one of the tests I underwent can give us a few data points on our condition. But none tells the whole story. That’s why Health Nucleus collects all of this data… to paint a complete picture of our health.
If we don’t have a complete picture of our health, we may very well be missing something. And that “something” could be quite serious and materially affect our longevity.
Consider this: 25% of us who live to 55 will not make it to 75 years of age. I don’t know about you, but those aren’t odds I’m comfortable with. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about death from a car accident or our parachute not opening up.
These are deaths from cardiovascular diseases, cancer, neurological diseases, respiratory diseases, diabetes, and many other things. But if we know about these factors and our risk, we actually have the ability to create completely different outcomes for ourselves.
In fact, the teams at Human Longevity and Health Nucleus published some unbelievable research earlier this year. It was years in the making. It analyzed the results from 1,190 adults who went through the same testing I did… and here’s what they found:
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17% had a rare genetic mutation that affects their health.
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7% discovered they had moderate to severe cardiovascular risk.
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29% had elevated liver fat, which was mostly nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
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2.5% discovered they had body or brain aneurysms.
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And 1.7% discovered they had cancer.
And at a higher level:
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14.4% discovered major health issues that were actionable. Let’s think about that. Out of 1,000 people, 144 found at least one major health problem they didn’t know about.
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And 40%, or 400 out of every 1,000, discovered things that required medical attention or regular monitoring but weren’t yet life-threatening.
To me, these numbers are remarkable. And they perfectly explain why one out of every four adults who reach 55 never makes it to 75. We simply don’t know what’s wrong. And if we don’t know, we can’t take positive actions to heal ourselves.
That idea quickly gained personal significance to me…
I didn’t need any training to see it.
An ominous, dark blob on my MRI scan in the area of my pelvis.
Cancer. I was in the 1.7%.
The lesion the scan found indicated a high likelihood of prostate cancer. A biopsy confirmed it.
It wasn’t what I expected.
After all, my trip to Health Nucleus wasn’t because I was ill. In fact, I didn’t have a single health concern before my trip to La Jolla. My goal was to put myself through the process so I could research bleeding-edge approaches to predictive medicine, genetics, and human longevity.
I’m young, active, and train three or four times a week. I’m strong, energetic, and a third-degree black belt in Shotokan karate. I consume a gluten-free version of a largely Japanese-style diet full of fish and vegetables. It just didn’t make any sense.
That’s precisely the point of precision medicine. There was no reason to justify my getting a full-body MRI or even a prostate-specific MRI. The cancer would have likely gone unnoticed for years, and it could have potentially cost me my life.
The great news is we found the cancer early, and I can act to change my outcome. One way or another, I’m confident I’m going to be fine.
But my experience shows the power behind this precision-medicine trend. The ability to identify problems before we get sick… cure diseases, not just treat the symptoms… and transform the way we do healthcare… will completely revolutionize the field of medicine.
And it will give us extraordinary investment opportunities along the way…
As my longtime readers know, I’ve been pounding the table on one particular technology in the precision-medicine space for years now: CRISPR.
CRISPR technology can edit our DNA as if it were software code. It’s a way to “program” our genome and remove the “typos” – or, in genetic terms, the mutations – from our DNA.
In the past, I’ve referred to CRISPR as the “God Key” because of its potential to cure thousands of genetic diseases.
There’s one particular company in this space that I don’t want any investors to miss out on. It’s a company I believe is on the verge of curing one of the world’s worst inherited diseases. Once that news breaks, I believe this stock could soar in a single day… perhaps as much as 1,000%.
And this company has already completed dosing its first cohort of adult patients…
That means it could release this news at any time.
That’s why this opportunity is so time-sensitive. It’s your last shot to get in before the company releases results.
If you want to find out more, I’m hosting a special presentation next Wednesday, December 9, at 8 p.m. ET called The Cure Event. I’ll share all the details with investors there.
You can register for free here. I hope to see all of you then.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
(Note: Neither I nor Legacy Research has any professional relationship with Health Nucleus. We receive no compensation of any kind for writing about my experience there. I paid full price to go through the program.)