WELLNESS
MEDICINE TO A T
Precision medicine leads to personalized care in Asheville
BY KATE LUNDQUIST kvlundo@gmail.com What if a medical practitioner told you it was possible to look into the future of your health? To predict what illnesses you might get and what medications could be helpful or harmful to you? While it might sound fantastical, companies around Asheville are starting to dive into exactly that: Precision or “personalized” medicine (also known as targeted medicine) is beginning to gain traction. “I don’t want to live to be 200, but I would certainly love to be incredibly healthy until I am at least in my late 90s,” says Sandra Grace, a patient at Apeiron Medical in Asheville. She attributes her success with weight loss, hormonal balancing and relief from depression to the program run by Dr. Daniel Stickler, co-founder and chief medical officer, and Mickra Hamilton, co-founder and chief executive officer. Hamilton says Apeiron Medical offers precision medicine to optimize human potential by taking into account each individual’s physiology, emotional makeup, genetics and genomics (the study of an organism’s genes to find variations that affect health, disease or drug response). Once all that is analyzed, Hamilton and her team prescribe evidence-based therapies that facilitate longevity and peak performance. “It’s kind of like somebody out there actually knows my life blueprint,” Grace says. “They are working with your whole life blueprint, DNA, your genetics and genomics and how it balances.” Hamilton and Stickler assess over 300 genetic base pairs that vary among individuals to give guidance to the client. These genetic variations help them in guiding individuals to their best dietary and supplementation pattern. Athletic gene variations can even be used to optimize athletic performance or exercise response by providing individual information on heart-lung capacity, metabolic capacity from the mitochondrial level, propensity for muscle fatigue and ability to recover from intense workouts.
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IT’S IN YOUR GENES: Lynn G. Dressler, director of personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics at Mission Health, confers with Pablo Sagaribay, microarray lab team leader at the Fullerton Genetics Center in Asheville. Photo courtesy of Mission Health “We don’t let our clients focus on their disease because that becomes their identity and that becomes part of psyche,” says Hamilton, a colonel in the Air Force and a human performance expert who helps people with stress reduction, diet and exercise. Hamilton was on the team that authored the Human Performance Concept of Operations for the Air Force.* Although located in Asheville, Apeiron also works with clients around the world, both virtually and in conferences. In Asheville, how-
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ever, clients have access to a variety of equipment, including a sound healing chamber, a Dexiscan (which scans a person’s body for fat, bone and muscle density), a brain mapping cap and exercise equipment. Hamilton and Stickler are also developing their investment platform so they can open a research center in Fairview — a long-term goal that would enable people to fly in for treatment and stay in villas that they are also planning to build. They already have the blueprint from an architect, Hamilton notes.
While Apeiron prefers to focus on creating lifestyles based on genetic blueprints, Lynn Dressler, director of personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics at Mission Health, focuses more on what medications might cause harm, based on a person’s genetics. “Personalized medicine is a broad term, but mostly it is how someone’s genetic makeup will respond to a drug, like side effects or if a drug is effective for a condition,” she says. In accordance with Mission Health’s media policy, the interview with Dressler