Teleaus Biosciences: A journey for better human health and welfare

In this Covid inflicted time of vaccine conundrum, human health has been brought into a new focus.  To move forward into a new Post-Covid era, a data-driven analysis of the human body and its disorders is of urgent importance.  No scientific platform will be as relevant as one that links our health, lifestyle, and nutrition, all in an evidence-based, data-driven package of personalized medicine.  Seizing this opportunity, a new Sydney company Teleaus BioScience aspires to be the trend-setting leader in this space.  For Teleaus BioSciences, this journey is also about tailoring the new platform to the human population's heritage history and deploying the best science with unique ancestry, tradition, and lifestyle requirements.

The narrative of the emerging era of human health science is tied to the code of life, popularly known as DNA.  Gone soon will be the conventional days of medicine where for a particular disease, one medicine and dose are given to all adults.  Often the protocol for one medicine-for-all has been constructed around data obtained with only a Europe-centered population ignoring the genetic variants extant in hundreds of human societies outside Europe. Personalized genomic medicine wants to change that by linking analyses of disease with evolutionary history and the allelic variation of each individual.  The new process requires that diagnosis be obtained by analyzing unique DNA signatures peculiar to an individual patient of a particular ancestry, lifestyle,  food habits,  and the hitherto ignored DNA codes he carries in him from the bacteria in his gut known as the microbiome.  That such personalized uniqueness of the patient is encoded in her own DNA and the billions of microbes that live in her gut; has initiated a revolution in the thinking around nutrition and therapy; a development Teleaus aspires to learn and deploy.

For such a hypothetical patient of the current time, her own DNA mainly reflects her evolutionary history, which has endowed her with alleles that she shares with her relatives and ethnic group, while her second genome, her gut microbiome, reflects her food lifestyle and the stressors of her life.   While this DNA-GUT axis has created uniquely novel opportunities, the astronomical amount of data that must be crunched to understand it ensures that this protocol will not be readily understood or deployed by a GP or even a specialist doctor.   Personalized DNA-driven new medicine thus will need the highest level of computational analyses; with novel algorithms of AI and Machine Learning (ML).  It will need a new class of data-driven medical analytical scientists to help the doctors and the nutritionists as well as individual patients and subscribers.

Happily, in these skills, Teleaus has both dreams and competence.   To Zahangir Alam, the realization of personalized medicine's potential by the deployment of computation was immediate and obvious.  He has lost no time in deploying an international group of experts to deep-dive into the field to create a new innovative platform that will generate better human nutrition and lifestyle prediction informed by individual genetics of the individual and the complex composite genetics of his gut-microbes.  This group contains some of the best minds in genomics, data mining, and AI.

Teleaus has already started this journey.  The big data will come from the uniqueness of an individual's genome carried from generation to generation.  Subscribers will have their DNA sequenced and analyzed and have their gut microbiome decoded.  The massive population of South Asians, including Bangladeshis, who have so far remained outside the analyses paradigm of western medicine, where data have primarily been obtained for the people of Europe, will immediately benefit from this platform.  The information about this platform will be announced in multiple languages covering the most significant part of humanity.  

Though available, personalized medicine technology has not yet been deployed widely in medical practice in mainstream medicine or nutrition Australia or another developed world.  It is a far-away dream for the bulk of humanity living in the developing world, such as South Asia and Africa.  This is where Teleaus sees a huge opportunity.  This opportunity could not have been seized by an entity not endowed simultaneously with community connectivity, computational knowledge, and skills in genomics and the microbiome.  Teleaus has acquired these competencies and is ready to go into the future with a robust dream of data-driven personalized medicine.  Their journey will sure break new ground in the coming years.

Writer: Head of Scientific Innovation, Soil Carbon Co.