Yesterday, I attended the HealthCare Summit in Luxembourg. This was interesting to know a bit more about a subject that I don’t know very much, i.e. the Precision Medicine. Precision Medicine or P4 Medicine means for Personalized, Predictive, Preventive and Participatory. The idea is to have
The Right Therapy for the Right Patient at the Right Time
This requests to collect a lot of data:
- Clinical data (analyses, imagery, …)
- Research (studies, tests, …)
- Behavior (social media)
Bio-data-scientists collect all those data, and using Big Data techniques, doctors can adapt the therapy to each specific patient. In the future, thanks to the progresses of nanotechnology, nanobots, i.e. robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter) will have myriad roles within the human body. They could for example reverse human aging. This could of course also be achieved thanks to genetic engineering.
This leads Dr Catherine Larue, CEO of the Luxembourg Institute for Health to say
“Tomorrow we could have a world without disease!”
Another amazing development is Digital Operating Rooms for surgery operations. The idea is to have a fully digital operating room and one can imagine having the surgeon being in the US while the patient is in Europe for example. Worldwide specialists could then intervene on some serious cases without the need to transport either the patient or the surgeon.
Last but not least, there is today a need to have applications and services aggregating all the data coming from therapists, hospitals, wearables, fitness trackers, … so that the info can be used optimally. Eventually, in the future, wearables will be coupled with micro-devices able to instantaneously inject drugs into your body to prevent some illness, stroke or other disease.
We are still at the early beginnings of this new medicine, and I will update in my next posts.
