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Biography |
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Rafael RANGEL-ALDAO received his MD from University Central of Venezuela, and PhD at the Department of Molecular Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. He is an Invited Professor of Digital Molecular Medicine at Simon Bolivar University, and CEO of Corporation B4B, an information company of predictive and digital health and wellness. For a thirty year span, Dr. Rangel-Aldao has served both in the academic sector as professor of biotechnology at several major institutions of Venezuela (1979-2009), and Director of Research and Innovation at Empresas Polar (1987-2005), the largest food conglomerate of Venezuela and the third of Latin America. Professor. Rangel-Aldao has also published extensively in a wide range of fields from biochemistry, molecular biology, chemistry, plant physiology, and biomedical research, to food product development, and agricultural research and plant breeding. Rangel-Aldao is author of several triadic patents in biotechnology applied to both the food and biomedical industries.
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Abstract |
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-A Systems Approach to Digital Health and Wellness |
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Health and wellness depend on two main factors, heredity and lifestyle, and both can be assessed and controlled on a personalized fashion by digital means. Current advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) can enable an individual the necessary knowledge and access to services, to monitor her/his own state of wellbeing, as well as to procure when necessary specialized healthcare online. A new paradigm of personalized and participatory medicine is thus emerging by which ICT empower individuals to care by themselves, and be responsible for their own wellbeing to extend healthy life expectations. This change is part of a shift from reactive to a proactive medical approach, as well as to the so-called patient-centered medicine and informed diagnostics, with physicians as personal advisors and big data as a powerful source of new medical knowledge. Within this realm it is now possible to study part of the complex interactions of heredity and lifestyle, to predict and prevent their potential deleterious outcomes, or to devise and develop precision measures to treat or preempt the onset of disease. We will show an example of a follow-up of three years, performed with the help of our platform of digital health and wellness (www.digitalprevent.com) to integrate by emergent computing, data from five dimensions of lifestyle derived from simple questionnaires (body shape, diet, physical activity, social life, and early clinical manifestations of disease). The results are in turn, contrasted with genomic data of ethnicity and gene variants (haplotypes) performed by a commercial vendor (23andme.com), as well as with metagenomics of intestinal microbiota (contracted with ubiome.com). Such comparison of lifestyle and genomics can therefore, report on the one hand, the extent by which certain genomic predispositions to major non communicable diseases, as determined by ethnicity and gene variants, can be modified by our recommendations of lifestyle. On the other hand, given the paramount importance of an appropriate daily intake of food for wellbeing, we found how the change to a healthy diet correlated well with a favorable shift of the microbiota. |
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