Professor James Heath
 

The emerging world of personalized, preventative, predictive, and participatory (P4) medicine will likely be enabled by the developing field of systems biology. Systems biology and P4 medicine and both data driven and, accordingly, both require new tools for making large numbers of measurements rapidly, quantitatively, and at practically zero cost. Microfluidics, chemical, and nanotechnologies will revolutionize our ability to generate comprehensive data sets that span from individual cells to patients, and will allow us to build multi-parameter analysis tools (quantitating genes, proteins, and cells) for achieving an informative in vitro disease diagnosis, as well as in vivo molecular imaging probes for spatially localizing specific diseases. However, the requirement that the measurements be done at extremely low cost (information becomes the commodity of value) imposes severe restrictions on these emerging technologies. Using cancer as a theme, I will describe the state-of-the-art in terms of network models of human diseases, and I will describe how those models may be harnessed for information that can impact the clinical care of cancer. I will then describe a suite of multiparameter diagnostics technologies that we are developing in my lab in concert with other groups, with both near and far term applications targeted.

Professor James Heath is the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, Professor of Molecular & Medical Pharmacology at UCLA, and Director of the National Cancer Institute’s NanoSystems Biology Cancer Center. Heath received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1988 from Rice, where he was the principal student involved in the Nobel Prize–winning discovery of C60 and the fullerenes. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1988-91, and on the Technical Staff at IBM Watson Labs from 1991-94. In 1994 he joined the faculty at UCLA. He founded the California NanoSystems Institute in 2000 and served as its Director until moving to Caltech. Heath has investigated quantum phase transitions in quantum-dot designed materials, and he has developed architectures, devices, and circuits for molecular electronics. His group has recently been applying their nano/molecular electronics work toward addressing problems in cancer. He has received a number of awards, including a Public Service Commendation from Governor Grey Davis, the Feynman Prize, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (Israel), and the Spiers Medal from the Royal Society (U.K.).