The future of healthcare lies in working hand-in-hand with technology and healthcare workers have to embrace emerging healthcare technologies to stay relevant in the coming years. Let’s take a look at a few prominent technologies that will shape the future of healthcare.
Credit: UW Medicine.
Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine tested a vaccine for an aggressive type of breast cancer.
About half of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer are expected to die within five years of treatment. The UW team tested the vaccine on 66 patients with this common type of cancer and tracked their progress. “We’ve now followed these women for ten years and 80% of them are still alive,” said Mary “Nora” L. Disis, lead author of the phase 1 results published in JAMA Oncology.
The HER2 protein is common in the body, but women with HER2-positive breast cancer produce 100 times more than normal. Patients with the best outcomes tend to mount a strong, cell-killing immune response to the high levels of the protein, so Disis and her team attempted to strengthen patients’ immune response with a DNA vaccine. The vaccine instructs the body to produce a particular portion of the HER2 protein that is known to provoke such a response and deliver it to the immune system. The three-dose shots resulted in the intended immune response without causing damage to healthy tissues.
A team in Bristol, U.K., has grown blood in a laboratory. Credit: NHS Blood and Transplant.
British researchers transfused red blood cells created in the laboratory into humans.
Blood donations are always in high demand. Patients with diseases such as sickle cell anemia require long-term, repeated transfusions and may develop antibodies against some blood types. Lab-made blood could help those patients, as well as people with rare blood types that are harder to find donors for.
Researchers from several U.K. institutions isolated stem cells from donor blood. They cultured them in the lab to create red blood cells, which they tagged with radioactive markers and transfused into two trial participants. The research team will compare results from the fresher (all young) lab-grown cells. “We hope our lab-grown red blood cells will last longer than those that come from blood donors,” said chief investigator Cedric Ghevaert, from the University of Cambridge. “If our trial, the first such in the world, is successful, it will mean that patients who currently require regular long-term blood transfusions will need fewer transfusions in the future, helping transform their care.”
Human cells infected with influenza virus, viewed with an electron microscope. Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school tested a potential universal flu shot.
There are 20 known flu strains, and each flu season, scientists tailor vaccines to the strains predicted to circulate that year. The shots are less effective when those predictions miss the mark. As such, they “offer little protection against pandemic influenza virus strains,” the UPenn team wrote in Science. They are working on a single vaccine to guard against illness from any strain of influenza.
The scientists used mRNA vaccine technology, like that in COVID-19 vaccines. The genetic data in the vaccines encodes for fragments of proteins found on the surfaces of all 20 flu strains that cause illness each year. When tested in rats and ferrets, the shots were 100% effective against flu viruses with proteins that closely matched the vaccine’s encoded proteins and still 80% effective against another strain with different variants of those proteins. Today’s flu shots reduce the chances of needing treatment by 40% to 60%.
University of Washington scientists created a test for blood clotting that requires just a drop of blood and a smartphone.
Some people with heart issues have to monitor blood coagulation with frequent doctor visits. “The devices that exist in hospitals to test for this haven’t changed much for 20 or 30 years,” said Shyamnath Gollakota, senior author of a study in Nature Communications. “But smartphones have been changing a lot. They have vibration motors, they have a camera, and these sensors exist on almost any smartphone.”
A person uses a finger prick to draw a drop of blood and inserts it into a tiny cup. The cup fits into a smartphone attachment under the camera lens. Using the phone’s vibrating motor, the cup shakes the sample while the camera tracks movement of a floating piece of copper within. When the copper stops moving freely, it means the blood has coagulated.
Theranostics creating a future of precision medicine
The StarGuide SPECT/CT system. Credit: GE HealthCare.
Theranostics in prostate cancer care begins with the production of radioisotopes for use in diagnostic tracers — like gallium-68 PSMA-11 — which attaches to a patient’s specific cancer cells and releases radioactive emissions to provide molecular information unique to the patient. A new Solid Target Platform for GE HealthCare’s PETtrace cyclotron — in combination with its FASTlab 2 New Edition platform — can produce 100 times more gallium for radioisotope production than a common generator, increasing access to theranostics capabilities for patients and clinicians.
In order to read the emissions from gallium-68 PSMA-11 tracer, a highly sensitive PET/CT scanner is needed, which gives the clinician information to make personalized therapy recommendations. After Colombian engineer Jorge Uribe lost both of his parents to cancer, he decided to use his skills to develop PET/CT scanners that could help improve outcomes for patients in places like his Andean hometown of Manizales.
New therapies play a critical role in advancing theranostics and helping patients. A recent therapy for advanced prostate cancer, called lutetium-177 PSMA-617, was approved by the FDA. It works by binding to and delivering a small amount of radiation to prostate cancer cells anywhere in the body, to help patients live longer and maintain quality of life.
Clinicians want to know if the therapy is working; that’s where StarGuide SPECT/CT system comes in. This new system, with new digital focus detector technology, can scan patients in 3D to provide more information to clinicians, and it’s optimized for treatment monitoring.