This means that it is now becoming more affordable to compare one person’s DNA with another’s, learn what diseases those with similar genetics have had and discover how effective different medications or other interventions were in treating them. Imagine doing a Google search on specific genes to find others like you and learn their abilities, allergies, likes and dislikes and what diseases they are predisposed to. That future is closer than you may think.
This opens up an era of crowd-sourced, data-driven, participatory, genomics-based medicine. Today, medicines are prescribed on a “one size fits all” basis. When a particular medication causes a significant negative reaction with a small part of the population, it is prevented from being available to anyone. In the future, expect to see doctors prescribing and selecting the most patient-appropriate medicines based on a person’s DNA (the field of “pharmacogenomics”).
Vivek Wadhwa
Vivek Wadhwa is vice president of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University and Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. His other academic appointments include Harvard, Duke and Emory Universities as well as the University of California Berkeley.
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Regenerative medicine
Physicians have been conducting adult stem-cell therapy for more than 40 years in the field of bone-marrow transplantation, which involves transplanting stem cells that become red blood cells. Adult stem cells are now being applied in a variety of arenas, from orthopedics to cardiovascular therapy. The first trials using cells derived from embryonic stem cells were for acute spinal cord injury and started within the last year. But embryonic stem cells have raised ethical and moral controversy even though the research remains critical for future progress.
The good news is a new type of cell, induced pluripotent stem cells, which will enable the generation of personalized stem cell lines for use in diagnostics, prognosis or potentially for therapy in the same patient. IPS cells can replace embryonic stem cells for some applications and are, for example, being used to develop neurons from patients with ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease in order to better understand the disease and develop new therapies.
Tissue engineering and 3-D printing technologies are also beginning to merge. The combination of the two technologies could lead to an era of personalized organ generation. Indeed, earlier this month, surgeons in Sweden carried out the world’s first synthetic organ transplant— a synthetic trachea/windpipe structure created and seeded with the patient’s own progenitor cells.
These developments are just the beginning. There will undoubtedly be regulatory, reimbursement and other challenges. And there will be heated debates about ethics and morals. But it won’t be long before we are using devices similar to the “Star Trek” tricorder and synthesizing our medications.
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