Institute For The Future

Using Regenerative Medicine to Preview Biological Responses

 

At IFTF, we're always looking for new tools to better understand future possibilities--and our 2010 Science, Technology and Well-Being map highlighted a new tool for personal health foresight: Stem cell research. The basic idea is this: the tools of regenerative medicine, which now enable scientists to, for example, engineer skin cells into other kinds of cells, such as heart cells, will enable scientists to test out effects of different kinds of treatments inside of petri dishes, rather than inside our bodies. It's the sort of shift that, over the long run, could help bring about an increasingly personalized form of medicine, where medicines are prescribed based on how your cells within a petri dish react.

 

We called this forecast biological previews:

 

 

 

Technology Review has a great slideshow of some of the different diseases that scientists are now researching through reversed engineered stem cells, ranging from common conditions like Diabetes to rare diseases, such as ALS (or Lou Gehrig's Disease.) It's likely that understandings of these sorts of rare conditions--fewer than 6,000 people per year in the United States are diagnosed with ALS--will benefit the most from biological previews, since researchers will not only be able to gain better models of how the diseases progress but also view the potential effects.