Science of Healthy Living

Science of Healthy Living
HRM- 630

Shruti Thakur

A lot of study and research have been done over the past years on a large growing diversified American population which was designated to the people over 60 years of age to understand the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services provided. A lot of shortage is found in the primary care, largely driven by growth and aging of patient population. Healthcare is advancing exponentially. One of the interesting thing about technology is that we are getting better in a faster way. Many technologies may have been around for some years but have had little impact to date. Implementation of information technology is a major challenge for the healthcare sector towards future.

It is difficult to predict what we might be doing in Biopharmaceutical research and development in future. But there are few things we might be definitely doing such as, intelligent medicine, personalized healthcare, regenerative medicines and gene and oligo-based therapy. 72% of the global population have mobile phones and a lot of people are connected with social media via internet. There is a huge opportunity of technology use that would be utilized by the healthcare industry and would contribute in healthcare reform.

Great strides have been made in the field of personalized healthcare. There are companion diagnostics now being approved by regulators and we are starting to the panels of diagnostics being used. This will mean that at the start of diagnosis, a panel of tests could be performed so that the therapy could be tailored to the type of mutation and make a better prognosis. This approach will become more commonplace as it becomes more familiar with the physicians. We will start to see it being adopted and emerging markets as well.

In a long run, we could see a time when physicians not just run the genome analysis, but also a metabolism analysis and approach analysis to get really thorough understanding of what is driving the disease. This could be done using a number of different techniques by a small chip that will provide physicians with much better clarity in order to tailor available therapies. Although a potential challenge will be the management of large quantity data generated from such devices.  

Regenerative medicine is a concept which would help to repair the body and replace lost or damaged tissue. Rather than just destroy or remove the damaged diseased tissue, we will be able to replace those. There are many complex issues to deal with, but our understanding of how to use stem cell is growing year by year and we will start to see stem cells being used in regenerative medicine. Gene therapy is a primary way to treat numerous disease, which was granted approval first in 2012 by EU.