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Buck Institute’s Bredesen to focus on preventative care

NOVATO – After 10 years at the helm of the prestigious Buck Institute for Age Research, Dale Bredesen is venturing into the realm of for-profit heath care.

He’s partnered with Allan Lees, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder and former CEO of Object Switch, now Kabira Technologies, to start a new kind of HMO, or HPO, as he calls it, for Health Protection Organization.

“The fundamental problem with health care today is that the way we deal with patients doesn’t match how diseases work,” said Dr. Bredesen.

Since the development of antibiotics defeated the major infectious diseases, most people die of chronic diseases, he said. Cardiovascular and arterial vascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, type II diabetes and renal failure, the leading causes of death, are generally not treated until the appearance of symptoms brings a patient to the attention of a physician.

“By then the disease has taken 75 percent of its eventual toll. The time to treat it is 10 years before the symptoms appear,” he said. Patients are often told their condition is inevitable, a result the aging process.

“After 20 years of seeing patients as a neurologist and internist, and 20 years of overseeing research into the diseases and causes of aging, I know that’s not true,” said Dr. Bredesen, who announced in March he was leaving the Buck Institute.

With that in mind and some seed funding in hand, he and Mr. Lees have designed a health care model that uses both Web-based and physician-based diagnostics to identify and treat chronic illness before it appears. “You could call it ‘preemptive medicine’ or ‘preprimary care,’” he said.

The plan, dubbed Prevarex for the moment, would initially be supplementary to a subscriber’s HMO or PPO, although Dr. Bredesen hopes its value will become clear to and adopted by traditional providers.

Their target markets are corporations concerned about an aging work force, and their pilot programs will be through high-end health clubs, which will offer the plan as an additional service to members.

The plan includes a Web-based diagnostic tool. It’s the equivalent of an in-depth doctor’s conference.

But unlike most Web-based diagnostics, the physician is on the site itself, evaluating results and following up with testing and prescriptive medicine.

By mid-May, an alpha version of the Web site will be live and a physician will be in place at the first site, a well-known health club in San Francisco. “Eventually we’d like to see over 1,000 sites around the world, 25 in California,” said Dr. Bredesen.

According to Mr. Lees, $800,000 in seed funding received in September of 2007 should see the startup through the first version of its diagnostic tool and the placement of two physicians in the Bay Area. A round of $1.5 million is being sought to place four to five more physicians within the year.

“Our model is as scalable as Starbucks and we can ramp up as quickly as we need. But we decided not to pursue the large venture funders, who look for rapid growth. We want to be very, very careful with investor money,” said Mr. Lees.

Meanwhile, he’s an enthusiastic user of the Prevarex product. “I feel like I’m aging in reverse. I believe that this plan can restore a 50-year-old to the energy and resilience of a 35-year-old,” he said.

For Dr. Bredesen, the goal is to keep a 50-year-old from the ravages of a chronic disease that could easily have been held at bay for another 10 or 20 years. “It’s astonishing to me that we demand the most thorough and constant maintenance for our airlines, but not for ourselves. I’d like to be instrumental in changing that,” he said.

To contact Dr. Bredesen call 416-254-1041 or e-mail him at dale@prevarex.com.

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