The Future of Medical Technology

Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. For centuries the art of medicine has been dominated by bumps, bruises, or other symptoms, felt by the patient or discovered by the physician, with eyes ever-magnified by increasingly sophisticated scanning technology: the microscope, the xray, and eventually the MRI. But however powerful the machine, the underlying model remained the same. To find the illness, doctors first had to look for the symptom. To diagnose the cancer, they had to see the tumor. To find a drug, they had to undergo a long, costly, and laborious process of trial and error, trying millions of natural compounds on animals to find one that seemed to work. This approach to medicine may be coming to an end. As drug discovery becomes an information-based science, speeded by rapid increases in computer processing power and the marriage of test tubes with microchips, we are transforming the way we diagnose and treat many of the worst human diseases. New drugs currently in clinical trials are no longer scattershot one-size-fits-all affairs, but carefully targeted to the molecular fingerprints of specific diseases. Some of these drugs are even targeted to a patient’s unique DNA profile. In a breathtaking paradigm shift, medicine is moving from the species level—the ingrained assumption that drugs and diseases work the same in all human beings—to the individual level, unlocking new healing possibilities in the minute differences between seemingly similar diseases and their individual victims. The result will be a new age of medical therapy, dominated not by cell, tissue, and organ replacements but by early diagnosis and individualized drug treatments.