UCLA Global, May 26, 2026 — Advanced Tomorrow, or ATOM, brought its series of global healthcare dialogues to UCLA in late winter. Held at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center, the ATOM forum hosted roughly 300 professionals with diverse expertise and was cosponsored by the National University of Singapore and its Yung Loo Lin School of Medicine (an “ATOM Partner”), UCLA International Institute and XPrize.
The event offered presentations, interviews and panel discussions on the current state of healthcare and longevity by a wide variety of experts, including medical researchers and clinicians, medical entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, professional athletes and humanities experts. Numerous faculty and clinicians from UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA were in attendance.
From left: Vartan Sarkissian, ATOM CEO; Armen Sarkissian, former president of Armenia and ATOM
co-founder; and Dr. Eric Ersailian, UCLA professor of health sciences, clinical professor of medicine and chief,
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases. (Photo: Reed Hutchinson.)
From a technology to a healthcare focus
The CEO of ATOM, Vartan Sarkissian, is a veteran of early international cybersecurity policy initiatives and spent 20 years in the investment sector, founding two cybersecurity start-ups in the process. The searing experience of helping his wife get a diagnosis for disabling pain in her upper abdomen changed his life and professional focus.
“For 11 years, we went from doctor to doctor. None of them could understand where the pain was coming from,” he explained.
Multiple misdiagnoses led to three surgeries, one of which nearly ended in her death, and the unnecessary removal of her gall balder. At one point, doctors believed she was imagining her symptoms; at another point, she was told she would need a liver transplant within months. Similarly, she was diagnosed with a severe virus, only to find it was a false positive after Sarkissian insisted she be retested twice.
“It was a very existential experience,” he reflected. “You can imagine the ripple effects is had on us as a family: on my wife, myself, my children and our community. It affected our sleep, our stress levels, our quality of life.”
In the end, his wife was diagnosed with thoracic diaphragmatic endometriosis. Endometriosis is a painful condition in which the soft tissue lining the walls of the uterus starts to grow outside the uterus. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 190 million women of reproductive age are affected by the condition worldwide.
Once thought to be limited to the pelvic region, newer evidence indicates that endometrial cells can travel within the body. “[Doctors have found] endometriosis in the eye, in the brain, the lungs and the nostrils,” said Sarkissian. Surgical removal of such cells, which are difficult to recognize even for experts, does not guarantee that the condition will not return.
Highly limited treatment options means that Sarkissian’s wife continues to live with the condition. “I am quite impressed with her endurance and perseverance,” he said. “She’s a strong lady.”
Elaine Hsiao (far right), Ph.D., UCLA De Logi Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Goodman-
Luskin Microbiome Center, and principal investigator, The Hsiao Lab at UCLA, moderated a panel on the gut
microbiome. Dr. Lin Chang (far left), UCLA professor of medicine; director, Walter and Shirley Wang
Center for Integrative Digestive Health; and principal investigator, Chang Laboratory; and
Dr. Gregory Donaldson (center), UCLA assistant professor of medicine and professor of microbiology,
immunology and molecular genetics, were the featured speakers. (Photos: Todd Cheney).
Launching a global effort to revolutionize healthcare
During his wife’s long search for an answer, said Sarkissian, “I began to see that healthcare is reactive and ad-hoc, often based on the knowledge and experience of the individual whom you end up talking to.”
So the investor shifted gears and decided to bring his convening skills to the world of health. “At first my focus was endometriosis. It became women’s health when I realized that women were not even included in clinical drug trials until the late 1980s.” (The practice did not become mandated by law in the U.S. until 1993. See articles by the NIH and AAMC.)
“We call ourselves a modern society, an advanced society, but healthcare has so many leaps that it needs to catch up with,” he noted. “That's what led to the creation of ATOM.
“We see healthcare in a holistic way. For us, it doesn’t mean doctors, medicine, hospitals and patients. It means everything from music and health, art and health, physical wellness, sports training, pharmaceuticals, hospital systems and access to health and so on.”
From left: Jon Truett, former British soldier and member (22 years) of the British Special Forces;
and Dylan McKay, founder and director of RenderSafe, and former human performance program lead,
New Zealand Special Forces. The two men spoke at the "Chaos and Order" panel, which used
AI, live biofeedback and wearable neuromuscular technology to explore how human physiology
mirrors the pendulum between entropy and coherence. (Photo: Reed Hutchinson.)
The nonprofit aims to build an interdisciplinary “healthcare ecosphere” to revolutionize modern healthcare through interdisciplinary dialogues that encourage diverse professionals to think big about how healthcare can be transformed from reactive to proactive care.
Essentially, ATOM is practicing personal crowdsourcing on a global scale. Its invite-only forums dispense with introductions, relying on an online biography of participants instead, and dive quickly into the heart of different topics.
Using relatively short sessions (20 to 35 minutes) punctuated by networking and coffee breaks, the forums facilitate the free exchange of ideas and interests among participants, followed by slightly longer panel discussions (40 minutes) on specific themes at the end of each forum.
The UCLA dialogue in late February 2026 was the fourth such forum. Two large-scale invite-only meetings were previously held in Singapore (December 2023) and London (November 2024), together with a smaller forum of roughly 50 people in Singapore (December 2025).
“Now that the forums are in motion, we're launching what we're calling the ATOM Partners Program,” explained Sarkissian. “Partners will take a specific topic that we discuss during the forums and create a yearlong program in association with academic institutions, investors, technology providers, policy makers and stakeholders who are interested in that particular topic.”
As part of the program, each respective partner and the participants in their program will create a blueprint, or operational plan, for a specific area of healthcare, based on an evaluation of existing diagnostic approaches, care solutions, their advantages and disadvantages and ultimate desired care outcomes.
To date, ATOM has identified four priority areas, or “pillars,” for these working groups: women’s health and endometriosis, women’s health and menopause; neuro health and autism, and the gut and the microbiome.
“We're trying to be careful not to bite off more than we can chew, so we are starting with these four,” said Sarkissian. “The documents created by the partner programs will be released at the end of the yearlong process.”
At the next large-scale forum, he explained, “We will work on it further, so that it keeps developing a yearly iteration.” Additional partner programs on the same topic in different areas of the world are planned to incorporate diverse input, with the ultimate goal that the work will spark global research collaborations, diagnostic and technology application development and the elaboration of public health policies, among other outcomes.
“These documents will belong to the people who write them. They won’t belong to us (that is, ATOM). Their names will be on it. They will have worked on it. We're just the platform that’s facilitating its creation it as a nonprofit,” concluded Sarkissian.
Dr. Julio Frenk, UCLA chancellor and distinguished professor of health policy and management,
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, delivers remarks at the ATOM Forum. (Photo: Todd Cheney.)