The 3 most important health innovations of the past decade – The Hill

The 2010s are coming to an end, and looking back there have been some pretty amazing advances and innovations in health and science.

Advances in prosthetic limbs

Prosthetic limbs have been around since ancient times. In Egypt, a prosthetic wooden toe was found on a mummy dating back 3,000 years. By the Dark Ages, inventors could incorporate hinges on prosthetic arms used by knights. In modern times, the field of prosthetics has turned to incorporating more technology into physical stand-ins for limbs. In the last several years, theres been a boom in advances that have led to the best and most useful prosthetics weve ever seen.

Reports from the early 2010s talked about the potential for new technology to allow people to control prosthetics with their minds and to receive sensory information from their devices. It may have been a reach in the early part of the decade, but now it is literally within grasp. There are new prosthetic hands being tested that give the user the ability to grab objects with their thoughts and even to sense the texture of what they are touching. New bionic hands allow the user to feel again by sending signals back to the brain about the things they are touching, like whether its hard or soft. Other research groups have been working on bionic arms that can move based on the users thoughts through a brain-computer interface. While these have demonstrated its possible to accomplish these goals in the lab, theres still more to be done before people can use these devices outside in the real world.

Many of these advanced prosthetics are still prototypes and may not reach the general population for a while. Luckily, cheaper 3D printers have made simple prosthetics more accessible. These are important because a prosthetic device can improve the quality of life for people. For example, this person has been printing prosthetic hands and arms for people in Africa after watching an online tutorial. New materials that go into 3D printers are cheaper than they used to be and are being used in prosthetics to provide a more affordable option for patients.

Although prosthetics have been around for ages in some form or another, they arent always used. One variable to consider is the social acceptance of having a prosthetic. Theres still a lot of stigma around disabilities and many people may reject prosthetics even if they are available. In 2012, an athlete with both feet amputated competed in the mens 400 meter race at the Olympics in London. There was some controversy over whether the runner with a prosthetic foot should be allowed to run in races with people who dont have prosthetics or if they should only be allowed in competitions specifically for people who have them. Prosthetics also need to be comfortable and usable in order to be successfully adopted. In one study, about 4.5 percent of people rejected prosthetics and 13.4 percent stopped using their prosthetics. As the new prosthetics that are more natural and intuitive to use come to market, hopefully more people will benefit, and the social barriers to acceptance will disappear.

CRISPR

The genome modification technique called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, aka CRISPR, was a culmination of a few decades of work by scientists, and major studies explaining the method were published in 2013. The version of it called CRISPR-associated protein 9 or CRIPSR-Cas9 is what most researchers are specifically using in most cases. It involves a regular gene editing mechanism that happens in bacteria. The bacteria can take sections of DNA from attacking viruses and essentially use that to remember the viruses if they return. When the virus is back, the bacteria can target the matching sections of DNA in the virus, cut it and disable the virus.

Though 2013 was only six years ago, as far as science goes, CRISPR has been moving at lightning speed towards practical applications. Using CRISPR to edit a gene sequence, researchers can now add, delete or modify DNA segments more quickly and accurately than ever before. Since the technique was developed, researchers have used CRISPR to target diseases caused by a single gene like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease.

Probably the most infamous use of CRISPR are the CRISPR babies. In late 2018, a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, claimed to have used CRISPR to modify the genomes of two babies to include a mutated version of a gene that protects against HIV. This case was and is highly controversial for the ethical concerns with genetically modifying a human genome at the embryo level, or germline, meaning it can be passed down to future generations and has not been done before in humans. Recently, MIT Technology Review obtained excerpts from Hes research, and experts say that the report and data may be untrustworthy. This means it is still unclear if He and collaborators actually successfully modified the babies genomes. The scientific community overall condemns this way of using CRISPR to edit a human germline genome and has called for an international moratorium on it until a framework can be agreed on.The researcher has been sentenced to three years in prison in Shenzhen, China.

As fraught with controversy as the CRISPR babies may be, CRISPR technology still holds a lot of promise and can be used responsibly, supporters say. For example, researchers are using it to target cancer cells by taking a patients immune cells, modifying them using CRISPR and then infusing the patient with the modified cells. For blood diseases, a patient with sickle cell disease is reported to be responding well to a CRISPR treatment that has allowed her body to produce a crucial protein.

Another area that has boomed this decade partly because of CRISPR technology is stem cell therapy, which well get into in the next section.

Stem cell therapy

Technically, the only Federal Drug Administration (FDA)-approved stem cell therapies are blood-forming stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. Blood-forming stem cells are used to treat patients with cancer after chemotherapy has depleted blood cells, as well as patients with blood disorders like leukemia whose bone marrow tissues are damaged. These types of treatments have been around for about 30 years, but in the 2010s weve seen potential for more uses of stem cells in health care.

The main idea behind stem cell therapy is that because the cells are pluripotent meaning they can become many other types of cells they can be introduced into parts of the body that are damaged and need new cells. On top of that, researchers can now extract some types of stem cells from a persons body, so no need for umbilical cords. This opens up the possibilities for highly personalized treatment where one person can be treated with stem cells from their own body.

Researchers are exploring how stem cells can be used to treat liver disease, cerebral palsy, stroke, brain injury and others. There are many ongoing research-backed clinical trials for stem cell therapy. A quick search for stem cell therapy on the governments clinical trial database turns up 5,638 results. And because of the work necessary to even get to the clinical trial stage, theres likely an order of magnitude more stem cell therapy studies in the pre-clinical trial stages.

Stem cell therapy is also being offered in for-profit clinics around the U.S. In these cases, the clinics are typically taking fat tissue from a patient, isolating the stem cells and then administering the stem cells back to the patient. In some cases, the treatments may lead to health complications, like blindness in a few extreme cases, and the FDA warns that such treatments are unapproved and potentially harmful. The FDA is ramping up regulation of stem cell clinics and earlier this year took a specific clinic in Florida to court.

Although there are many stem cell clinics offering unproven stem cell therapies, its not all hype. Granted that its difficult to pass the clinical trial stage to get FDA approval, stem cell research may lead to new treatments for several health conditions that could completely change the health care landscape.

You can follow Chia-Yi Hou on Twitter.

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The 3 most important health innovations of the past decade - The Hill