We are living in a time of remarkable medical innovation. While new medications and surgical techniques continue to be discovered, delivering relief for patients and their loved ones, some of the newest advancements are awe-inspiring in their potential to touch every one of us.
As medical futurist Bertalan Meskó, a physician and scholar, writes in this issue of Trend, artificial intelligence in just a few short years has upended our understanding of what can be possible in medical care, from smartwatches that detect atrial fibrillation to genetic tests so simple they can be conducted in the privacy of our homes. AI can now analyze medical imaging and pathology slides at accuracy rates that rival specialists.
Along with these developments comes a need for new understanding between doctors and patients and between medical researchers and policymakers. “Medical innovation today is no longer confined to the invention of drugs or devices within the walls of research labs, but a living ecosystem where science, technology, patient empowerment, and society converge,” Meskó tells us.
Public health and medical innovation have been central to the mission of The Pew Charitable Trusts from its founding more than 75 years ago. For the past four decades, we have supported the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences, funding young, promising researchers. That program—whose alumni now include six Nobel Prize winners—led to the creation of the Pew Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences, supporting young scientists from that region, and the Pew-Stewart Scholars Program for Cancer Research, which for more than a decade has assisted young researchers seeking to accelerate discovery and advance progress toward a cure for cancer.
Ziyang Zhang, a Pew-Stewart scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, writes in this issue about a medical innovation that can help many cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Although significantly boosting cancer survival, standard chemotherapies are broadly toxic—as Zhang writes, “the medical equivalent of weeding a garden with a bulldozer,” killing healthy cells alongside cancerous ones and often leaving patients fatigued and nauseated.
But Zhang and other researchers are working at the molecular level to determine what makes cancer cells unique and then to attack them directly, limiting damage to normal tissue. Called targeted therapy, the new approach is transforming modern cancer treatment by creating drugs that are more effective in fighting cancer with fewer side effects. And additional research is finding ways to boost the body’s own immune system to target cancer.
Pew also focuses directly on public health issues, with data playing a key role in innovative approaches. While physicians, of course, rely on patient data such as blood pressure and other vital signs to diagnose and guide treatments, public health agencies use data to keep communities healthy.
The need for modernizing how data is collected and provided to health agencies was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when automated electronic case reporting was rare and most health information was still being transmitted by fax. The states, where so much innovation happens in many policy areas, saw the need to move more quickly.
In this issue, Kathy Talkington, who oversees Pew’s work on public health issues, reports that more than half—53%—of state, local, Tribal, and territorial public health agencies have upgraded their systems and receive digitized case data for at least three-quarters of the health conditions that physicians and other providers are required to report.
Still another key use of data: the two-decade-old national syndromic surveillance program that collects digital data on the symptoms that patients report in hospital emergency rooms, allowing near-real-time understanding of conditions and concerns facing the public. The program was initially created in response to terrorist threats such as anthrax sent by mail; an example of its broader use came when wildfires swept Oregon in 2020. Patients with respiratory symptoms filled hospitals, and public officials were able to use near-instantaneous data to track the smoke’s health effects and issue targeted warnings to the public.
All of these medical advances have done wonders for patients and for public health. As innovative as these discoveries and new methods are proving to be, we will always face disease and illness; they are a core function of living. And the work of medical innovation, now entering a new and dramatic phase through AI and technology, will continue to evolve and improve.
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