Personalized Medicine
Given the poor success rates of treatments for things like cancer and depression, medical professionals have been trying to tailor treatments to individual patients for some time. The medicine was one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies in our 2012 list. Decade on, there is renewed cause for optimism, says Dr. Elizabeth O’Day, CEO and Founder. “In the next 5 to 10 years, we will be able to get the right drug to the right patient at the right time at the right dose and optimize all of these parameters.“We spend billions of dollars every year on drugs or treatments that don’t work. Personalized medicine stands to correct this. Not only are we going to improve [patient] outcomes, but we can cut costs on drugs and treatments that aren’t going to benefit an individual. The scientists trying to figure out which treatments work best for which patients will require data from as diverse a group as possible.“We need all ethnicities, all geographies, people from all socioeconomic backgrounds to be involved in this process, or risk increasing health disparities, and that’s not the future of medicine that we want to create. DNA or RNA that encode desired proteins – have been in development for many years but saw unexpected success in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. The technology was on our list of Top 10 emerging technologies in 2017, and three years later, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna created the world’s first mRNA vaccines to tackle the world’s biggest health threat. Distribution of vaccines is a global challenge, access to genomic vaccine technology could be democratized, believes Prof. Robin, Chair of Mucosal Infection and Immunity at Imperial College London.“I think we’ll see many governments around the world wanting to establish their own manufacturing capacity and… because you don’t need a large manufacturing facility, it could move to a situation where there are many regional manufacturing center, that have the hardware and what becomes distributed is the software – the genetic code for the next pandemic pathogen or the next chronic target.“I’m hoping it will revolutionize a lot of what we do. It’s not a magic bullet, it won’t replace all other types of vaccines, but it will have an important role to play in public health. Social robots In 2019, we identified that droid friends and robot assistants would increasingly become part of everyday life, looking after the elderly and educating children - and the pandemic has accelerated this trend due to the need to maintain a social distance. There’s still a little way to go. As robotics become more integrated into people’s lives, they will need to be designed to detect, interpret, and respond to human behavior Nico Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.“In our consciousness as a society, we’ve been thinking about social robots for a very long time, but the reality is that most of the robots that are out in the world right now are much more physical robots that tend to be isolated from humans.“A social robot is not a replacement for social interaction, but becomes a medium through which communities can engage and people can interact.”“It’s really important as we build robots into our lives that we consider the ethical implications of robotics, who has access to these different technologies and what these technologies are perpetuating in terms of the social norms that are already embedded in society.”
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