Metagenics opens doors to Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Center

Health science company, Metagenics, Inc., announced last week the opening of its 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 Brent Eck, Metagenics, Inc. CEO, the PLMC will serve as 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 healthcare to members of the public. The Center will follow a personalized lifestyle medicine approach, tailoring its therapeutic programs to each individual patient.

"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,” said Bland in a press release.

Lamb will be heading up the PLMC, according to the release. The clinic celebrated its grand opening last Thursday, January 24, and will be a separate entity from Metagenics, Inc.

“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,” said Lamb. “Good healthcare should be widely available, and our delivery of care in an insurance-based reimbursement model will make this care available in our community."

The goal of the PLMC, according to Eck, is to match a personal approach to health to each individual's needs and capabilities. said Brent 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,” he said. “We also believe that the healthcare practitioner is the key advisor on that individualized learning journey. That's personalized lifestyle medicine; that's the future of healthcare."


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 investigators in this research program, the Lifestyle Intervention and Functional Evaluation—a Health Outcomes Survey (LIFE-HOUSE) team, which includes Lamb, Michael Stone, MD, Deanna Minich, PhD, and Sara Gottfried, MD. The researchers have built a clinical-trial model that useda 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 today.

The initial data for this program is 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.