David Humphrey is an attorney, and CEO of a number of companies. He is a National Board Member of the Northwest Autism Foundation, THE FORUM, ACT Today! , and a co-founder of Autism Treatment Network (ATN), a joint project with 17 top tier treating hospitals headed by Massachusetts General Hospital.
Transcript
- David Humphry is an attorney and CEO of a number of companies. He is a national board member of the Northwest Autism Foundation, the Forum Institute, Act Today, and co-founder of the Autism Treatment Network, more commonly known as ATM, which is a joint project with 17 top-tier treating hospitals headed by Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the co-founder and director of the physician training group Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs, or MAPS. He was also executive vice chairman and board member of the Autism Society of America, and the Autism Research Institute. He is also the President and owner of Kirkman Group, Inc., and other companies including a pharmaceutical, nutraceutical company, and an environmental laboratory. Mr. Humphry's environmental laboratory focuses on mass spectrometry that specializes in analytical techniques that measure the mass-to-change ratio of charged particles and for elucidating the chemical structures of molecules. For the past 11 years, Mr. Humphry has devoted much of his time to the research and study of Autism. He is a successful entrepreneur and attorney who has founded several large companies. I've had the honor to work closely with Dave, and have found him to be among one of the most innovative and forward thinking people I've ever met. The latest project that he is involved with, P2i, Preconception to Infancy, is one of the most exciting and transformational initiatives happening in health care. Thank you, Dave for being here and providing us with a short overview of the P2i project.
- Well, thanks very much, Lee. I'll return the compliment. It's been my great honor and pleasure to work with you over the years, and a lot of these are collaborative projects we've done together. What we're going to talk about today is really an exciting area, and it's really the culmination of 15 years worth of work that we've done with the Northwest Autism Foundation, and more recently, Forum Institute. And I'm going to talk today on behalf of the work that the Forum Institute is doing. The Forum Institute, over the last 15 years, is probably the largest and most important think tank for special needs children. And special needs children are a large category of children that just, something is wrong with them. So, on the next slide, let's just take a look at what we're facing right now, and that's children with special needs, or they can also be called chronic disease conditions. And what we're looking at is 30% of all children by the age of five, are going to have something seriously wrong with them, and most will not recover during their lifetimes. That can be leukemia, it can be Attention Deficit Disorder, it can be autism, it can be mental illness, it can be morbid obesity. And we used to think that that was a genetic problem, hard-wired, couldn't be solved. And what we'll talk about today is the think tank working with scientists, and government agencies, and research communities, the consensus now is that almost all of these are environmental involvement. In other words, if it wasn't for the environmental insult, these wouldn't be happening. And in large part, it's great news, because it means these conditions are both preventable and predictable. But let's take a look at the batting average we have right now. 30% of the pregnancies end in miscarriage, 10% pre-term losing a lot of IQ points in health. Autism, 1 in 36 in some states with boys, and nationally it's about 1 in 59. But asthma, 1 in 8. Eczema, 1 in 5. Serious Food Allergies, 1 in 20, and the list goes on. ADHD, 1 in 6. Much higher rates. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in children. It's going up about 1% per year. So, the next slide, what we are talking about is that almost, on the right hand column you'll see, almost nothing is being spent on this category of the environmental implications to disease, even though it's 90% of the cause. Next. What we're looking at is traditional medicine on the left-hand side with episodic conditions. You had mumps, measles, broken arms, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and those got resolved pretty easily at the normal doctor visit. But look on the right-hand column. As those are going down, we're getting an absolute explosion in other kinds of conditions. ADD, autism, Chron's Disease, multiple sclerosis. And if you see those numbers go up, they go up precipitously since 1950. It is overwhelming the medical system, with 85% of the cost of the medical system being these chronic diseases, and they all have one thing in common. These are all autoimmune conditions that are greatly effected by early environmental exposure. Next. So, a real breakthrough came with a wonderful organization called the Environmental Working Group. What they did is they took cord blood from newborn babies not exposed to anything outside the womb, and they checked for 287 chemicals. And they found, out of the 287 - there could've been a lot that they tested for, this was expensive at the time - these new babies entering the world were loaded with chemicals that could cause cancer, that were toxic to the brain and nervous system, and over 200 had been banned from the market for years. This included DDT. This sent shock waves through the government agencies and medical community, because it was thought that the placenta was blocking all of these things out, and it wasn't. You can see the chart on the other side, we're up to 75,000 chemicals. We're swimming in a toxic pond. Very, very few of these have been tested for safety on an infant. On the next slide, I just want to quickly go through some of the quick accomplishments. The Autism Treatment Network was part of a $90 Million total funding of the NIH looking at what are the medical causes of Autism. The next slide talks about another accomplishment we had. And on the next slide, it talks about publishing that we've done in pediatrics. That was a gut publication. It was one of the best 10 papers in the last five years by IAAC. It set the stage for the medical conditions of autism at the time. Autism was not seen as a medical condition. On the next slide, it's again work being done by ATM, again extensive publications, and the person who was running the organization for us turned out to be the President of the American Academy of Pediatrics. On the next slide, we worked with ASA on a major publication that Lee initiated. That was autism was connected to environmental health. It was a breakthrough paper in 2008, not a lot of support for it, but it turned out that was exactly true. This was exactly what was causing 65-70% of the autism cases. Next. That's another paper that we recently did, Early Identification, and that will be part of a longer presentation of what is the advantage of catching these conditions early? Even at the age of one, and preventing them. So, a lot of really interesting things that we don't have time to cover today. But this is an example of how we've gone about looking at carefully building the evidence of doctors and clinicians. And their research can rely on what we do in order to build practice strategies. Next. It's another work that we've done showing, that was an example in Pediatrics of how toxic women are during their pregnancy period. This was done after the Environmental Working Group study. Next. So, the new model. This is a really important slide. Recently, the NIEHS and the EPA came out with a 130-page summary basically concluding that most of the chronic diseases are not genetic, but are caused by the environment. And up to 60% of Autism is caused by toxins. This was a summary of $350 Million worth of study done by 21 University centers, so we do have a very persuasive body of work that we now can go ahead and plan our medical strategies on. Next. So, they went through each disease case and looked at the environmental impact, and this was the slide talking about Autism and other conditions. So, a great body of work. Next. So, one of the really exciting areas where I doubt being able to measure the toxins, we do that with a new technology called Mass Spec, so with a drop of blood we're able to tell how toxic is the person and how that fetus will be impacted. That allows people to have strategies on getting rid of it. Next. The area of Exposome is the talk of how that's measured. It's external chemicals, the microbiome, which is your gut, and it's also stress markers. On the next slide, we talk about the importance of genetics are still important to measure. And a strategy would be to take newborns, and we take a genetic marker, like 23 and Me, but more extended. It would be inherited diseases, mitochondrian, autoimmune, so we have a complete picture of the infant along with the environmental exposures they've had in the womb. And this would give us a very good strategy of how to deal with that child's health to predict and prevent chronic diseases. I don't think that 90% of these diseases need to happen. This research will go ahead and move us toward that goal. Next. So, we have a very innovative campus that we're looking at which will allow all of you to access the campus as professionals and members of the public. It's like you're a part of a 3D game animation, you're an avatar, you're able to see See Me courses, you're able to see TED presentations. It's an incredible technology of being able to go through it step-by-step. And because we're out of time, I'll go through the next slides quickly. The next one will be working on your cellphone, so you can get lectures on the cellphone. And the next slide will talk about these campuses and ease of access, sort of like Disney Land, going from pavilion to pavilion. On the next slide, we talk about these pavilions being centers of information which is spectacular, because you can go to your particular area of interest and you can spend all day there listening to lectures, talking to other people. It has full video capabilities to talk to you doctor. It will completely change the way we get information, including our lab tests. On the next slide, we talk about each one can have a customized workbook that you can share with your doctor or health provider. This will make an incredible difference on how you're able to go ahead and share information, get opinions from a lot of different health care practitioners. We'll put the emphasis on predicting, preventing and early treatment of conditions, and that will be the future of medicine. So, in conclusion on the last slide, what we're looking at is we're having a goal in five years after this program begins and the campus opens, impact one million children by having safe pregnancies and healthy children. The goal is we want to unravel and predict how to prevent chronic disease. And just think, in your own lifetime, the number of children and the number of people that you know who have been affected by chronic disease. It is the issue of our day. So, thanks Lee for having me on, and we'll have a longer session and sort of drill down on some of these concepts on the next time.
- Yeah Dave. We're certainly looking forward to that longer discussion where we get more into the details, and really to demonstrate to our audience how this is perhaps one of the most important, significant and transformational projects of our time. Thank you for your leadership on this, and we're looking forward very much to your next presentation. Thank you, Dave.
- Okay, well thanks very much.