What will the future of medicine look like? Will we manage to cure cancer? Will lab-grown organs render human donation obsolete? Is a widespread uptake of the male contraceptive wishful thinking or a futuristic possibility? Some things seem to be more predictable than others.
What we do know is that medical care will be increasingly personalized, digital and data-driven.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we had a taster of how smartphones and computers could be harnessed to anticipate outbreaks of infectious disease. These technologies will play an important role in the future. As well as carrying technologies externally, we will also likely see patients wearing them internally too.
The use of sensors called ‘smart bodies,’ which are connected to the internet and reside inside the body, will likely play an important role in feeding back physiological information, such as blood pressure.
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Medical science will hold DNA sequencing data for tens of millions of patients, and this will better our understanding of disease. Moving toward the mid-century point, it is predicted that there will be routine DNA sequencing for every newborn baby. In the coming years, individual patient DNA analysis will likely enable the personalization of drug therapeutic approaches.
