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Discovering the PUER path to optimum health, wellness, and longevity.

Interview with PUER co-founders Szilard Voros, MD, and Karl Blass
PUER co-founders Szilard Voros, MD, and Karl Blass reveal the science and origins of a ground-breaking new medical service…
By Glen Ferris

As the bespoke and most scientific multigenerational concierge programme, PUER is in the business of making people’s lives healthier and happier. Through a unique high-touch, high-science approach, they offer what they call the ‘most comprehensive multigenerational health planning for families’, anchored in a concept they call “multiomic medicine”. Imagine if a team of physicians, scientists, nutritional scientists, and exercise physiologists poured over one person’s insights generated by the leading-edge technologies from genomics, molecular medicine, advanced imaging and AI. 

Designed as a ‘multi-generational family wellness programme in which members can participate over a long-term horizon to take advantage of genetic insights over generations’, PUER provides ‘the most extensive and integrated biological assessment of each member under an official clinical study by combining leading-edge technologies from genomics, molecular medicine, and comprehensive imaging.’ 

Here, co-founders Szilard Voros, MD, and Karl Blass reveal the science and origins of this ground-breaking new medical service… 

Puer

Can you talk about the origins of PUER? 
Szilard Voros: Karl and I had different and complimentary backgrounds that converged and resulted in PUER, the most exciting project we had ever done. For me, there were two key past experiences. 

First, I am a physician. I trained and practiced as an internist and as a cardiologist. In the first part of my career, I served as the Chief of Cardiovascular Prevention and Chief Scientific Officer at the Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta, GA. Here we laid the foundations of a comprehensive cardiovascular prevention program that allowed us to integrate early implementations of genetics, advanced laboratory testing, and leading-edge imaging technologies into everyday clinical practice. As an academician, I had the privilege of publishing in major, prestigious medical journals, such as Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The second key experience was that as a result of the cutting-edge research we were doing in Atlanta, we had the opportunity to enter the research and development field. We spent 12 years building some of the most exciting biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that invented and trailblazed the field of genomic and molecular medicine, imaging, and artificial intelligence for drug discovery and drug development. Using these approaches, we were able to discover and validate entirely new types of medicines that promise to further reduce the burden of heart disease in patients around the world. As a physician, it's incredibly rewarding to find completely new drugs that nobody had found before and start developing them and giving them to patients.

Building on these two distinct and unique experiences as a preventive cardiologist and as a biotech entrepreneur, Karl and I got together and we asked a simple question: “What would happen if we were to take all these technologies that we developed to transform how we do drug discovery, and applied those exact same technologies to patients today?” 

It takes about 17 years for leading-edge scientific discoveries to make their way into clinical practice. What PUER does is effectively bend space and time and make those technologies available to people today, not in 2041. 

Karl Blass
Karl Blass

Karl Blass: I come to PUER from the innovation and business side, and I’m passionate about moving forward Health Science Technology. The genesis and evolution of PUER is that we're in a unique position to be able to take proven technologies and create a novel pathway for revolutionising the way we look after ourselves - not to try and cheat death, but to maximise our health and wellness while we live. 

You offer what you describe as the world’s most integrated assessment of health, wellness, and longevity. Can you talk about the science behind the platform and what makes it unique? 
Szilard Voros: Campden Wealth has mastered multi-generational wealth planning, and we have mastered multi-generational health planning. We have the technologies today that drastically and dramatically change the trajectory for the health, wellness, and longevity of individuals and families. The secret is one single, salient word: “multiomics”. While most people have heard about “genomics”, or “epigenetics”, most people have not heard the word “multiomics” before. 

Multiomics, or multiomic medicine, is anchored in the most fundamental concept in biology, called the “central dogma of biology”. The central dogma states that life is encoded in our genes, in our DNA, which gives instructions to build our proteins, which in turn house all other molecules in our bodies. “Multiomics” refers to the idea that today, we can evaluate all of these using technologies such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc. Collectively, “multiomics”. 

Szilard Voros
Szilard Voros

Multiomic medicine is like time travel, because through the genetic component, we are able to look in the past and see what happened before we were born. We can see what happened to our parents and to their grandparents and to their grandparents. We can also look into the future, see our potential health trajectories, and of our children, and their children. 

I want to emphasise that everything we do is entirely rooted in science. We're not saying we're going to make you younger; we're not going to say we're going to make you immortal. What we can say is that we can discover your future health trajectory and we're going to be able to very significantly extend your quality of life and optimal health. It is like bending space-time. 

Karl Blass: To give a personal perspective, I always run at 100 miles an hour and maintain a healthy active lifestyle. I did annual physicals and what I was told to do by my doctor. However, with time, fatigue and slowing down began to impact me. I put it down to aging, but I was too young to slow down yet. There had to be a better way to figure out this impact on me and it did not seem logical that I had to accept this new circumstance without specific relevance to me. 

While in my 40’s I was diagnosed with two potential health trajectory issues. Over the course of years and trial and error, one of those conditions was identified and brought under control. The other condition remained “out-of-whack”, but I was told, manageable. When we started PUER, I was fortunate to be the first volunteer and as we developed the data, it was obvious what needed to be addressed. A single change of medication brought this condition completely into normal levels. With the right insights, thanks to PUER, my clinical team knew what to do, right away. 

Puer

You’ve described what you do as ‘generational health planning’. For families in which wealth and governance legacy is of utmost importance, are they a natural cohort in understanding your unique offering? 
Szilard Voros: Without a doubt. We all share the desire to have more time to pursue our passions, time for friends and family and time to leave a legacy. 

What PUER gives you is time, it’s just that simple. In the US, if you go to a primary care physician, they will spend somewhere between seven and ten minutes with you in the room, and then maybe another two or three minutes outside the room ordering two or three blood tests and one or two imaging studies. For wealthy individuals with a concierge practice, they will spend an hour with you and another two or three minutes ordering the same two or three blood tests and one or two imaging studies. 

Imagine what would happen if we were able to apply all these technologies that are available today: genomics, molecular medicine, advanced imaging, and artificial intelligence. Imagine if a group of physicians, scientists, and physiologists spent 40 hours on you before you even came through the office door. That is how we give you time. 

Karl Blass: We had a client who was really struggling with his health. PUER identified exactly what was going on, and the cause, so that the clinical team was able to ingests this information and order the right medical procedures. 

His condition was such that he could very well have dropped dead from a heart attack had he not come to PUER and been correctly described so that he could be diagnosed and treated. His life expectancy was maybe one or two years; his condition was a sleeper where nobody knew anything. PUER identified it and he was able to get the attention that was needed. Now, his new motto is that he is ‘living on PUER time’. 

For more information about PUER, click here.

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