Blocking Disease at the Cellular Stage Before It Develops: A New Concept of ‘Cell-Based Interceptive Medicine’

“Cell-based interceptive medicine,” which aims to block disease at the cellular stage before it develops, has been proposed as a new medical concept.

In a report published on the 3rd, the National Bio-Policy Research Center introduced cell-based interceptive medicine as a concept that targets the period “before disease onset” as an opportunity for intervention.

Modern medicine has made progress in treating individual diseases, but chronic and complex diseases are often detected only after cellular and tissue damage has become irreversible. By the time symptoms appear, options for intervention have already narrowed, meaning treatment outcomes depend less on the disease itself than on when it is detected.

Interceptive medicine aims to track the molecular state of individual cells over time, detect early signals that deviate from a normal trajectory and reverse them. As epigenetic changes accumulate in cells because of aging or environmental factors, they enter a disease trajectory; the goal is to detect and block this process early.

This represents a third point of intervention, distinct from conventional prevention focused on managing risk factors and treatment after disease onset. It is likened to an air traffic control system detecting an aircraft veering off course early and correcting its trajectory.

Realizing the concept requires integrating three groups of technologies. Single-cell multiomics and spatial imaging combine cells’ molecular states with information about their locations in tissue to create dynamic maps of disease; patient-derived organoids provide personalized experimental models that reproduce disease progression and drug responses outside the human body; and artificial intelligence (AI) builds computational models to identify disease patterns in large-scale data and predict future trajectories.

The center said this approach seeks to shift from a static diagnostic system to a dynamic, predictive one. Unlike existing cell atlas initiatives, which focus on building reference atlases and standardized data, such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) HuBMAP and the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) HTAN, it targets disease trajectories and the timing of intervention.

The EU’s LifeTime initiative, which formalized the concept, is a pan-European research network involving more than 70 companies and research institutions across 18 European countries. In March 2019, it was selected as one of six EU FET Flagship candidates and received €1 million in preparatory funding for 1 year. In September 2020, it published a vision paper in the journal Nature.

However, the initiative did not lead to the launch of a large-scale project. The FET Flagship program itself was not carried forward under Horizon Europe, so the planned 10-year, €1 billion program did not materialize, and implementation shifted to individual national programs.

France’s PEPR Cell-ID is the most developed follow-up program, with €50 million in funding over 7 years through France 2030. In 2025, Germany selected “ImmunoPreCept,” a new Cluster of Excellence focused on cell-based interceptive medicine, and will provide up to €10 million annually for 7 years starting in January 2026. In Portugal, NOVA University Lisbon and Germany’s Max Delbrück Center (MDC) jointly established the NOVA Institute for Medical Systems Biology.

The center said data governance and standards of evidence must also be redesigned for the approach to take hold in clinical practice. Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), differing health care data governance systems among member states are a bottleneck for integrated research, it said.

The center also said explainable AI that can provide a rationale for its decisions is a prerequisite for building trust. Because interceptive medicine involves intervening in people who have no symptoms, its benefits appear as “diseases that did not occur,” requiring long-term follow-up to demonstrate them. The center added that many signals of deviation from a disease trajectory may resolve naturally, creating an inherent risk of overdiagnosis and overtreatment.