The Future, Our Future! - Medical Advances

This article is the second in a series that will stretch your imagination and update your current perception of the future, you will soon be living in!

Medical advances have been incredible, at the time of writing we have mapped the human genome (which I will talk more about later in the article), created robots to help more successfully perform certain surgeries, developed artificial limbs and achieved many more life saving advances in medicine. However, after hearing what is expected within the lifetimes of many of us, you will realize that everything previously mentioned is just the tip of a very...very large ice berg.

To start with I am going to tell you about an outstanding achievement by the researchers over at North Carolina State University, they have created a machine that keeps a heart beating outside the body:

"Researchers can obtain pig hearts from a pork processing facility and use the system to test their prototypes or practice new surgical procedures," says Andrew Richards, a Ph. D. student in mechanical engineering at NC State who designed the heart machine.

The computer-controlled machine, which operates using pressurized saline solution, also allows researchers to film the interior workings of the pumping heart - enabling them to ascertain exactly which surgical technologies and techniques perform best for repairing heart valves.

By using the machine, researchers can determine if concepts for new surgical tools are viable before evaluating them on live animals. They can also identify and address any functional problems with new technological tools. "There will still be a need for testing in live animal models," says Dr. Greg Buckner, who directed the project, "but this system creates an intermediate stage of testing that did not exist before. It allows researchers to do 'proof of concept' evaluations, and refine the designs, before operating on live animals." Buckner is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State.

Using the system could also save researchers a great deal of money. Once the machine is purchased and set up, the cost of running experiments is orders of magnitude less expensive than using live animals. "It costs approximately $25 to run an experiment on the machine," says Richards, "whereas a similar experiment using a live animal costs approximately $2,500."

Heres a video of the heart:

Moving swiftly onto my next aspect of the future to look forward too is the subject of the HIV cure, starting with a quote from the U.S journal ‘Science’:

“The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine.

That enzyme was able to eliminate the HIV virus from infected human cells in about three months in the laboratory.

The researchers engineered an enzyme called Tre which removes the virus from the genome of infected cells by recognizing and then recombining the structure of the virus's DNA.

This ability to recognize HIV's DNA might one day help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to finding a cure: the ability of the HIV virus to avoid detection by reverting to a resting state within infected cells which then cease to produce the virus for months or even years.”

Tre, the enzyme engineered by a group of German scientists gives hope to the 40million people that are infected with HIV worldwide. I couldn’t actually find a year for when the cure is expected but with this breakthrough in the research I’m sure it won’t be long!

The phrase 'Life long enough to live forever' has been stuck in my head for the past couple of months. I can't remember where I heard it but About a year ago I came across the fascinating website of TED, which for those do not know is a company that holds conferences and gets the best minds in a wide range of specialties in one room to share their ideas. One day a couple of months ago I was looking through their library of videos and I came across a video called ‘Barry Schuler: An introduction to genomics’ for the 21 minutes of the video, I was hooked, someone could have robbed my house, including the chair I was sitting on and I wouldn’t have noticed! It was fascinating!
Genomics is the study of the genomes of organisms, its researchers are attempting to map the entire DNA sequence. When that happens, we really could live forever. At the moment we are not that advanced in the research, Barry Schuler who is an expert in Genomics says that if we can stay alive for 20 years we are likely to see 150 maybe 300!

I highly recommend that you watch his lecture!

My last comment on the subject is to let you know that over at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK they are working on creating a programming language for genetic engineering of living cells. The ultimate aim of the project is to press a button, and have the program translated to DNA sequences that can be synthesized and put to work in living cells. The possibilities and advantages of this are endless, like creating limbs from scratch and growing new livers for patients.

What would you do if you could program DNA?

Thank You for reading.

Tayler Hughes