Genomics, for everyone
Alireza Haghighi is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School who works on genetics — and who looks at it from a different angle than most. Marek and Aleksander first met him in Hong Kong, then again in Boston, in the same building that houses some of the biggest names in the field, including George Church, with whom he works.
His conviction is that we are lucky to live in an era of two world-changing technologies — genomics and AI — and that together they unlock predictive medicine: the ability to spot the risk of serious disease decades before it appears. Screen for a couple of hundred actionable genes and roughly 6–7% of people carry a positive finding — a cancer risk, an inherited heart condition — that can now be acted on early. Pharmacogenomics can tell whether a drug will even work for you. This is the essence of the Bridge of Prevention.
But the idea Alireza returns to, again and again, is equity. Unlike most cutting-edge technology, genomics can actually close gaps rather than widen them — if we choose to build it that way. He runs global partnerships to bring genomic medicine to low- and middle-income countries, and he is blunt that today’s genetic data is “very White,” drawn mostly from European populations; to understand human biology we need data from everyone. As he puts it, COVID taught us we cannot be safe if our neighbour is not safe.
His bottom line is one Marek shares completely: “the most expensive prevention is cheaper than treatment” — and the future of health is precision and personalised medicine that treats you as the unique person you are.
