The Nobel Prize in Medicine 2019 was awarded to three men for “their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability”. The Nobel Prize in Medicine 2018 was given to two men “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation”.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 went to a trio for developing “cool microscope technology” that “revolutionises biochemistry” by allowing researchers to study three-dimensional structures of biomolecules in their search for cure for the Zika and other viruses. One of the three chemistry winners of 2017, Joachim Frank of the US, said at the time that he “thought the chance of winning a Nobel Prize was minuscule because there are so many innovations and discoveries happening”.
Frank is still right about that. Technological leaps in medicine dubbed medtech are accelerating as researchers find better ways to treat more diseases, in more ways, for more people. Advances are occurring in biotechnology, immunotherapy, surgery, and foetal and neonatal care to name just some areas. Artificial-intelligence software trained on data from digitalised health records and devices can spot problems faster and more reliably than can humans. HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital operator in the US, for instance, now uses algorithms trained on 31 million cases to detect the sepsis infection that kills about 270,000 people a year in the US.
More medtech advances are certain. Money is pouring into research and development overseen by regulators and doctors to ensure benefits outweigh risks. Common sights soon might be robot physicians, remote surgery and mini 3D-printed organs. Bacteria genetically reprogrammed to destroy tumours in mice could one day work on humans. Genome scans and gene therapies could become routine.
For all this promise, however, medtech comes with two certain and one likely drawback. The first definite disadvantage is that medtech is raising ethical issues that could stop the deployment of key advances. The two most sensitive are the gene-editing of foetuses (‘superbabies’) that could alter human experience and protecting the privacy of patient data, an issue highlighted in November when it emerged that US healthcare provider Ascension had secretly handed over the records of tens of millions of patients to data crunchers at Google. Medtech’s other certain shortcoming is the cost. Many advancements might never become mainstream because they could prove too expensive for governments burdened with budget deficits and heavy debt loads that are already facing rising healthcare costs as their populations age.
Medtech’s contentious disadvantage is doctors are finding that self-monitoring via devices, which often detects harmless abnormalities and fuels hypochondria, is leading to unwarranted anxiety, incorrect diagnoses and unneeded treatments. All up, medtech’s value to society will be tied to the extent to which these disadvantages limit the spread of its unquestionable benefits.
Many of medtech’s ethical issues could be resolved, to be sure, but that won’t be easy. Some medtech advancements, especially those based on AI, are economical. Medtech needs to be assessed with the perspective that there is much it is not solving. Medtech advances, for example, aren’t enough to avert the recent decline in life expectancy in western countries due to heart attacks tied to obesity. Medtech pharmaceutically does little for autoimmune diseases such as arthritis that afflict one in four US adults – though it is improving joint-replacement surgery. Researchers are yet to find a cure for infections made drug-resistant due to the overuse of antimicrobial drugs that the World Health Organisation says could kill 10 million people a year by 2050. Nothing medtech has come up with is usurping MRI scans and X-rays.
Be these as they may, medtech advancements are ushering in treatments that produce better outcomes for patients. Only time will tell how much ethical, economic and other possible drawbacks limit mainstream access to medtech’s benefits.
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