ALISO VIEJO, Calif. – On January 24, Metagenics, Inc., a health sciences company, today announced the opening of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Center (PLMC), a clinical research laboratory and patient clinic, at its Gig Harbor, Washington, location.
A shared vision of Jeffrey Bland, PhD, Joseph Lamb, MD, and Metagenics CEO Brent Eck, the PLMC will be a research laboratory, as well as a state-of-the-art medical clinic with insurance-billing capabilities. It will be staffed with practitioners for the purpose of providing health care to members of the public. The Center will follow a personalized lifestyle medicine approach, tailoring its therapeutic programs to each individual patient.
Bland stated, “I am so pleased to see the opening of the Gig Harbor Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Center that — through its excellence in patient management and research efforts — will accelerate the availability and adoption of this important approach to the prevention and management of chronic disease.”
Heading up the PLMC will be Joseph Lamb, MD.
“It is with great pleasure that I return to Gig Harbor,” said Lamb. “Thanks to Brent Eck and Dr. Bland, this unique collaboration is actually re-creating the best elements of a research center that had done groundbreaking studies in Functional Medicine and is now combining those with the best practices of a personalized medicine approach. Good health care should be widely available, and our delivery of care in an insurance-based reimbursement model will make this care available in our community.”
“The fundamental goal of the PLMC is to match a personal approach to health to each individual’s needs and capabilities,” said Eck. “Our belief is that much of our health is a very learnable set of skills — a series of small behaviors performed day in and day out, repeatedly over the long term. We also believe that the health care practitioner is the key advisor on that individualized learning journey. That’s personalized lifestyle medicine; that’s the future of health care.”
Certain chronic diseases are related to lifestyle and aging, and they are taking an increasing toll on individuals’ efforts to maintain good health. As a result, there is a significant unmet need to identify the value of a personalized lifestyle medicine approach for improving health measures, through diet, nutritional supplementation, exercise, and mind-body programs.
A significant element of the PLMC will be its groundbreaking research program, which eventually will be used to develop therapeutic tools and programs that will permit personalized lifestyle practitioners to meet this need.
Metagenics is supporting a team of investigators in this research program — the LIFE-HOUSE Team (“Lifestyle Intervention and Functional Evaluation—a Health Outcomes Survey). Team members Joseph Lamb, MD; Michael Stone, MD; Deanna Minich, PhD; and Sara Gottfried, MD, have built a truly unique clinical trial model. Their model utilizes a tent-umbrella-bucket design to gather data on individuals, both as individual patients and as members of an overall employee health population. The vision for this project is that excellence of care will benefit the individual participants, with widening ripples of influence upon their workplaces, their families, their communities, and ultimately upon the way medicine is practiced in the 21st century.
The initial data for this program are being gathered in order to make correlations among genes, the microbiome, diet, blood markers, and similar factors, with the goal of helping to make predictions for therapeutic programs.
Opened to the public January 24, the PLMC will be a separate entity from Metagenics, Inc.
About Metagenics, Inc.
Metagenics was founded on a revolutionary idea: Our genes do not predetermine our health potential and, through nutrition, we can impact how our genes express themselves. Embodied by our company motto — “genetic potential through nutrition” — this groundbreaking principle drives us to deliver high-quality, science-based nutritional supplements, medical foods, and lifestyle programs. We support health care practitioners in their efforts to help patients achieve their health goals. With a range of nutritional solutions designed to support individual lifestyles — including non-GMO, gluten-free, and vegetarian offerings — we remain committed to supplying practitioners around the world with advanced tools to help improve patient outcomes.
SOURCE: Metagenics, Inc.
