Originally published by Vivek Wadhwa on LinkedIn: Medicine will advance more in the next 10 years than it did in the past century
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently announced a $3 billion effort to cure all disease during the lifetime of their daughter, Max. Earlier this year, Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker donated $250 million to increase collaboration among researchers to develop immune therapies for cancer. Google is developing contact lenses for diabetic glucose monitoring, gathering genetic data to create a picture of what a healthy human should be and working to increase human longevity.
The technology industry has entered the field of medicine and aims to eliminate disease itself. It may well succeed because of a convergence of exponentially advancing technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, sensors, and genomic sequencing. We’re going to see more medical advances in the next decade than happened in the past century.
We already wear devices, such as the Fitbit and Apple Watch, which monitor our physical activities, sleep cycles, and stress and energy levels and upload these data to distributed servers via our smartphones. And those smartphones contain countless applications to keep track of our vitals and gauge our emotional and psychological states.
Then there is sequencing of the human genome, first completed in 2001 at a cost of about $3 billion. It’s possible today for about $1,000, with costs falling so fast that, by 2022, genome sequencing may be cheaper than a blood test. Now that it has been mapped into bits that computers can process, the genome has become an information technology.
With increasingly large sample sizes and tools such as IBM’s A.I. system, Watson, scientists are gaining an understanding of how our genes affect our health; how the environment, the food we eat, and the medicines we take affect the complex interplay between our genes and our organisms.
The next big medical frontier is on the horizon: our microbiomes, the bacterial populations that live inside our bodies. We may think we are just made up of cells, but in reality there are 10 times as many microbes in our body as cells. This is a field that I am most excited about, because it takes us back to looking at the human organism as a whole. The microbiome may be the missing link between environment, genomics, and human health.
Some children, for example, are born with a genetic predisposition to type-1 diabetes. Researchers tracked what happened to the stomach bacteria of children from birth to their third year in life and found that those who became diabetic had suffered a 25 percent reduction in their gut bacteria’s diversity (possibly from antibiotics). In another study, on Crohn’s disease, scientists took a small sample of feces from a healthy person and gave it in an enema to somebody with Crohn’s. Though that seems a disgusting procedure, it proved extremely effective in curtailing the condition. Scientists are also finding a correlation between the microbiome and obesity. It may well be the bacteria in our guts that make us fat — not just the food we eat.