Fountain Life’s specifically trained generative AI platform will provide personalized insights for customers and clinicians.
As the field of preventive health continues to evolve, one company leading the charge in innovative diagnostics and health optimization is Fountain Life. Known for their commitment to longevity medicine, Fountain Life has now taken a significant step forward by developing Zora AI, a generative AI platform specifically trained in functional and longevity medicine. By delivering personalized insights through two AI co-pilots, Fountain Life aims to redefine how both clinicians and patients interact with health data.
Launched today, these AI co-pilots mark a major milestone for the company, following its acquisition of LifeOmic in December 2023. The dual systems will cater to both medical professionals and patients, allowing clinicians to stay at the forefront of functional medicine research, while providing Fountain Life members with accessible, tailored responses regarding their health status. The platform integrates individual diagnostic data, including genetic makeup, MRI scans and blood panel results, into its responses, offering a personalized service that goes beyond the generalized answers provided by other AI models such as Chat GPT.
Longevity.Technology: Fountain Life’s approach to personalized healthcare is bolstered by the integration of its comprehensive diagnostic services, which are available through the APEX Premium Longevity Membership. Members can access a suite of precision tests, including full-body MRIs, genetic assessments, and executive blood panels. The AI co-pilots, powered by Zora, take this data into account, offering actionable recommendations tailored specifically to each user’s health profile, ensuring that both patients and their clinicians can make informed decisions grounded in the latest advances in longevity research.
In a Longevity.Technology exclusive, we sat down with Fountain Life’s CEO Bill Kapp to find out more about using data and AI in preventive medicine and why healthcare could learn a thing or two from the airline industry.
Kapp explains that one of the big challenges that needs addressing, especially in healthcare research, is that it tends to be population-based.
“That’s fine for general recommendations, but we’re trying to move toward a more personalized approach which incorporates a multi-modal and multi-omic system – everything from genomics to microbiome analysis. We’re trying to move beyond generic recommendations, using population health data as a baseline, but then personalizing it by placing all the knowledge we have today into a separate data cloud.”
That data cloud is then trained with models with reinforcement learning on both what specifically happens at Fountain but also with simulated innovations and protocols around functional medicine. Fountain Life focuses on not just treating a disease, but on analyzing its root cause and finding out why the disease occurs in the first place – the goal is to go upstream from traditional medicine and reverse what is happening.
“We’ve seen a lot of engagement from people who are interested in their health, and our platform gives them their data back in a context that’s actionable. For example, they can see their heart health results and ask: ‘What can I do about heart disease? What supplements should I take? What medications might be appropriate?’ This is a detailed look at their health history, but more importantly, the platform gives them actionable insights for daily life.”
One challenge in traditional healthcare is that people often forget to ask important questions while in the doctor’s office, and it can be hard to get answers later. Kapp explains that the Fountain platform enables users to ask unlimited questions in order to overcome that barrier.
“We provide data that you can discuss with your AI assistant about specific versions of your health data,” he adds. “The goal is to give people more agency over their health, because medical records, while accessible, are often hard to interpret.”
These data are incredibly important, both for patients and clinicians, and as ever, shine a spotlight on the vital concept that prevention is better than cure.
“The reality is, we’ve looked at the data, and by catching things early you can take action before people become symptomatic; this means we can lower the healthcare costs dramatically, in the order of 50% or 70%,” explains Kapp. “Things caught earlier are much easier and cheaper to treat, and so rather than waiting for end-stage heart disease or dementia, catch things early and treat things early.” Kapp makes the point that the population is aging, so doctors are treating a lot of age-related complaints like necrotic diseases, explaining that this is a reflection of the fact that while treating communicable diseases and various public health measures undertaken over the last 100 years have done an amazing job, now we are at a point where people are living longer and developing age-related diseases.
“The idea of waiting until you’re symptomatic to get treatment is really something that we’re going to have to get away from, and it’s fundamental to what we believe at Fountain, because firstly, it’s better medicine and secondly, it lowers costs dramatically,” he says. “The system needs to change, and it will need a paradigm shift because doctors are trained in symptom based-medicine.”
Kapp likens the healthcare ideal to the airline industry.
“The vast majority of what the airline industry spends its money on is not advertising dollars or treating problems after the fact,” he explains. “It’s preventing the problems from happening before they occur. It’s a combination of everything from aggressive preventive maintenance programs to planned obsolescence and overhaul, all designed to catch things before they occur – that’s the direction healthcare needs to move in.”
All this needs data and understanding and leveraging that data needs powerful AI tools. Kapp makes the point that the amount of data available to clinicians today is immense – so much so, that it is impossible to process it all without AI.
“We are performing whole genome sequencing, analyzing trillions of microorganisms and looking at thousands of biomarkers,” he explains. “Without AI, it would be very difficult to collate all this data and draw meaningful insights – and to be sure nothing had been missed!”
Acquiring LifeOmic was a strategic move for Fountain.
“They had an academically rigorous platform in oncology and precision medicine, but we saw potential beyond oncology,” Kapp explains, adding that the amount of data they were able to capture was exactly what Fountain needed to apply to everyday health. “We didn’t design this from scratch – it’s been in development for about eight years, building the infrastructure needed to process this data. The back end is incredibly complex, but to the member, it’s simple to use.
“We’re fortunate to have a team of experts in AI and machine learning who have all had additional training in everything from genomics to biology to molecular biology. This allows us to speak the same language as the clinicians we work with, which has been a huge advantage.”
While AI is not replacing doctors, it is an important decision-support tool – and doctors who don’t use AI, may well be replaced, says Kapp.
“Doctors who don’t use AI will struggle because there’s no way for them to process the sheer volume of data required to give accurate results,” Kapp explains. “For example, up to 7,000 medical articles are published daily worldwide. AI can help clinicians stay updated and filter through this information, keeping them at the cutting edge.”
AI also helps by pointing clinicians toward clinical trials that could benefit patients. “If we detect early-stage cancer in a patient, for instance, AI can help identify relevant treatments or trials they may want to join,” he says. “Right now, a lot of that information is inaccessible to patients or buried in the system.”
“We do whack-a-mole medicine in the US, constantly taking care of problem after problem after problem – very rarely is anyone looking at the patient holistically, and even when they do, they don’t have the proper tools to really be able to check them out.”
Fountain Life is taking a different approach, creating a comprehensive care plan that involves not just a longevity doctor, but nutritionists, healthcare specialists and other experts.
“They work in tandem to create a comprehensive plan and Zora reads that along with health records, medication data and supplement information to create personalized treatment recommendations,” explains Kapp.
“One of the things we’re working on is making this data more digestible for the user,” explains Kapp, adding that people often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, so Fountain is developing tools to help them process it in layman’s terms.
“This data will connect to other health apps like Apple Health and Google Fit, and we’ll be adding features like continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) to give users real-time insights into their health,” says Kapp, adding that the goal is to help Fountain members understand not just what is wrong, but how to fix it and how to extend their healthy lifespan.
“We haven’t fully quantified it yet, but anecdotally, we know that our members tend to visit their doctors less frequently. They feel more in control of their health and aren’t as anxious about minor health concerns. For instance, if someone has chest pain in the middle of the night but has already had a clear coronary scan, they might be less likely to ring their doctor in a panic. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to your own health. By using the latest technology to screen for diseases early, we’re helping people avoid unnecessary anxiety about their health.”
Fountain built its Zora AI system on Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but Kapp explains they can plug and play any foundational model as they improve.
“Our model has already processed data from over 6,000 people. We’ve gathered proprietary data, such as full body and brain MRIs, cardiac scans, &c – it’s a treasure trove of data!” he explains. “In addition to the protocols that we’ve developed the guidance from our Chief Medical Officer, Dr Helen Messier, we have been able to take this proprietary data along with our protocol and then take the base model, functional LLM, and put it in a private data cloud, training it separately using our top notch functional medical physicians, really sets our platform apart. All of these functional models are very good and the foundational models will continue to evolve and get better; we like the idea of being able to use the additional data that we’ve gleaned along with our proprietary data set and applying it all.”
The privacy of this data is also a big focus, and Fountain has taken steps to ensure people’s health data does not end up on the open web.
“Health data is the most valuable data you can find on the dark web, and we take security very seriously,” says Kapp. “Everything is built on a HIPAA-compliant and GDPR-certified platform. We believe that as AI models get more personalized, the value of individuals’ data will only increase, and you don’t want your genome out on the internet.
“In the future, we hope to bring Zora into the home environment – integrating everything from sleep data to environmental factors like air and water quality. We’re just starting, but the idea is to give people their information back in a way that’s easy to understand. Over time, this will help people make better health decisions, but security will remain a crucial focus. We built this platform with the highest standards because when it comes to health, we can’t afford to cut corners. As tools like digital twins and epigenetic modifications evolve, they will help people manage their health better than ever before. We’re looking ahead to the amazing technology coming in the next 10-15 years, but we also need to bridge the gap between now and then, ensuring people don’t fall victim to preventable diseases in the meantime. The first step to longevity is ‘Don’t die from anything stupid’ – let’s pick up your heart disease, your metabolic disease and early neurodegenerative disease.”
