112-year-old Yasutaro Koide, then the world's oldest man, receives a framed certificate from the Guinness World Records as the world's oldest man, in Nagoya, Aichi prefecture in central Japan on August 21, 2015. Koide died on January 19, 2016 aged 112 years, 312 days JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images

Treating cancer isn't enough for Craig Venter. He wants to make sure you never get it in the first place.


Venter is the co-founder of Human Longevity, Inc. – a genomics company that's creating the world's largest and most comprehensive database of human genes. By sequencing human genomes, Venter can predict the likelihood of an individual developing a disease later in life. And he's now trying to cure the ultimate disease: ageing.

Thirty per cent of males aged 50 will never make it to 75, Venter told the audience at WIRED Health. A third of those will die from cancer, with a further third succumbing to heart disease. "If we can get predict these early," said Venter, "it will massively affect people's longevity."

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Human Longevity is also developing new brain-imaging techniques that can detect signs of Alzheimer's disease more than ten years before the brain starts to attack the brain."The trick is trying to prevent it – not seeing if we can regrow 30 per cent of your brain at some late stage," he said.

Craig Venter Carsten Windhorst

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Catching diseases early can have a profound effect on outcomes, Venter continued. For a 56-year-old patient of his who found a cancerous tumour below his breastbone, catching the tumour early meant avoiding two years of chemotherapy. Without the early discovery, the patient may have been dead within five years. "I think in the next ten years we're going to know more than we've known in human history about our own bodies," Venter continued. In 2000 it cost $100 million to sequence an entire human genome – today it costs Venter less than $1,500.


So far, Human Longevity has sequenced over 26,000 full human genomes, about one every 15 minutes. The data generated by that kind of research is huge – so far Human Longevity has generated around 3.4 petabytes about the genomes its sequenced.

Through that data, Human Longevity can predict someone's age, sex, weight and height, and even put a a face to your genetic code. Venter used the genetic data to predict the faces of individuals and compared his prediction with a 3D photo of the human behind the genome. The results were astonishingly accurate.

Healthcare companies soon won't be able to avoid gathering this data, said Venter. "Medicine doesn't change rapidly, but it's going to be forced to change by the type of data we are generating," he said. "People are going to realise they can't afford not to have this technology."[/i]