12 Medical Miracle Technologies to Watch

These wonders of modern medicine would be considered magic 100 years ago.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C. Clarke

If a person born anywhere on Earth in 1899 were to be transported into the future, to right now, into a modern city, they would find a lot to recognize but they would also be mesmerized by the miraculous pocket computers most people carry with them and the contrails of giant flying ships miles above. Said person might even experience a mild cardiac infarction upon seeing evidence that we’ve landed on the moon and are beaming pictures back directly from the surface of Mars (and they might be somewhat disappointed that Mars wasn’t teeming with jungle life).

Though the powerful advances of the Computer Age have enabled so much, perhaps no single area has had quite as much impact on society and our bodies as the steady march forward of medical technology.

Medical tech continues to amaze with new possibilities every year. While the pace of change may seem slow to patients who are suffering through conditions, more advances are being made on a regular basis than at any other time in history. What follows are a few of the most recent innovations that will really start to spread over this year and next. (I personally can’t wait to hear about advancements in cryogenic technology, but that, I know, is a long way off…)

1: Neuromodulation.

22 million people are affected by sleep apnea, a sometimes deadly condition in which breathing is disrupted, often hundreds of times in a single night, resulting in oxygen deprivation. Patients with sleep apnea have a much higher risk of strokes, heart disease, and higher blood pressure. Right now, noisy CPAP machines help these patients sleep and breathe properly. But neuromodulation will be a vast improvement for many. This will come in the form of an implant that monitors and stimulates airways to keep them open, leading to a quiet night’s rest for the patient and her or his partner.

2: Wireless brain sensors.

Used to detect subtle changes in the brain’s electrical patterns, these new sensors can help diagnose as well as track the progress of illnesses like dementia, Alzheimer’s, brain trauma and Parkinson’s.

3: Drone deliveries.

2016 saw the use of a drone to take medicine to a remote part of Rwanda. This will become more commonplace and will be a great boon to the treatment of medical conditions in isolated parts of the world.

4: Gene therapy for inherited retinal diseases.

Approved by the FDA, the treatment called Luxturna is made by Spark Therapeutics, and uses hijacked viruses to deliver healthy copies of the RPE65 gene, which is defective in patients who have problems (or completely lack) light receptors in their eyes. This FDA approval is also a big deal for gene therapies at large, as it opens the door for more trials of cancer therapies. Ultimately, this technology will save millions of lives.

5: Artificial pancreas.

The 1.25 million (and growing) people in the U.S. who are living with Type I diabetes have a ray of hope in the form of a new artificial organ that is an implanted blood sugar monitoring and insulin delivery device. Eventually, this device will also be available for the other 28 million people in the U.S. who have Type II (adult-onset) diabetes, and over 200 million diabetic people worldwide.

6: Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.

In a study by Juno Therapeutics, 24 out of 27 patients with refractive acute lymphoblastic leukemia entered remission after receiving treatments to engineer their T-cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. Six of those patients were still cancer-free after one year.

7: PCSK9 inhibitors.

In combination with statins, these drugs are showing they can drastically reduce bad cholesterol numbers, or low-density lipoproteins (LDLs).

8: AI-driven patient monitoring.

Up to 80% of alarms that current patient monitoring equipment deliver are considered unnecessary and generally only serve to contribute to hospital chaos and wasting nurses’ time. These systems have needed an upgrade for a long time, and they will be getting one in the form of software that will properly triage these warnings. As an added bonus, machine learning algorithms will allow the systems to eventually predict when a patient may be headed for trouble, giving doctors advanced warning that they’ve never had in the history of medicine.

9: CRISPR/Cas9 clinical trials.

In 2018, a Chinese researcher illegally used the gene-editing CRISPR tool to alter the embryos of two baby girls, who were born healthy. Now, finally, researchers in the United States have begun trials through proper legal channels. In one set of trials, the gene-editing tool has been used to alter T cell lymphocytes to target some cancers, and in another, some cells have been programmed to combat sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassemia.

10: Thought-to-language translation.

Patients suffering from full-body paralysis, with functioning minds who are unable to physically speak — much like the late Dr. Stephen Hawking who lived with ALS and communicated via a keyboard text-to-speech system — will be able to eventually think what they want and have those thoughts become words. Another win for deep learning and AI!

11: Wearable Biofeedback.

CTRL-Labs, led by Thomas Reardon, is making wearable wrist devices called CTRL-kits that monitor electrical impulses sent by neurons from the brain to the hand in real time. These types of devices will enable new therapies for people recovering from strokes and accidents.

12: Autonomous Robot Surgeons.

The Mako Stryker surgical robot is one of a new generation of medical technology that uses AI and machine learning to augment the ability of medical providers to help more patients more efficiently. Surgeons aren’t in danger of extinction, however, as the machines’ human counterparts will always be need to for oversight, collaboration and training of the robots.

If you know anyone who may benefit from some of these advancements in medicine, please let them know. Hope has always been some of the best medicine.

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