Suddenly it seems that we are in a golden age for medicine
Ozempic and Wegovy have already changed the obesity landscape in America – a breakthrough so often described and discussed in terms of cosmetic benefits and medical moral hazard that it can be easy to forget that obesity is one of the greatest risk factors for preventable death in the world. United States. Next generation alternatives may prove even more effectiveand there are signs of huge off-label implications: at least anecdotally, in some patients the drugs appear to curb compulsive behavior in a range of difficult-to-treat addictions.
And while the very first person to receive Crispr gene therapy in the United States received it for sickle cell disease just four years ago, it has since been rolled out for testing for congenital blindness, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and HIV. So far, only two applications for such treatments have been submitted to the FDA, but all told, about 400 million people worldwide are affected by one or more diseases resulting from mutations of one gene that could theoretically be easily solved by Crispr. And when Doudna envisions applications a decade or two later, the possibilities sound almost intoxicating: for example, providing single-gene protection against high cholesterol and thus coronary heart disease, or, in theory, introducing some kind of genetic prophylaxis against Alzheimer’s or dementia.
“Can we really do it?”
A much-discussed one in January paper in nature suggested that the rate of what the authors called disruptive scientific breakthroughs steadily declined over time – that, due in part to dysfunctional academic pressures, researchers are more narrowly specialized than in the past and often tinker in the margins of well-understood science.
But when it comes to the arrival of new vaccines and treatments, the opposite story seems more true: Entire branches of research cultivated over decades are finally bearing real fruit. Does this mean we are riding an exponential curve upward toward radical life extension and the total elimination of cancer? No. Progress is more patchy and fragmented than that, and indeed there are those who believe that progress should be even faster.
Amid the pandemic, there have been a number of calls for more acceleration, some highlighting the need to reduce drug development costs, which have doubled every decade since the 1970s, perhaps relaunching clinical trials. or to use so-called human medicines. challenge trials, or by streamlining the drug approval process. Graham, who is now senior advisor for global health equity at Morehouse School of Medicine, highlights issues of global distribution and access: Will the new technologies actually get to where they are needed most? “The biology and science we need is already there,” he says. “The question to me now is, can we really do it?”