A consulting firm dealing with long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
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alt="http://hfdigest.com/wp-content/gallery/pics/robomed2.jpg" Expect another massive leap in consumer computing power (and further validation of Moore’s Law) as breakthrough chips hit the market later this year. Hewlett-Packard will also be abiding by Moore’s Law in about a year from now, when it puts nanoengineered chips into its printers. Moore’s Law can also be seen behind the development of […]
The proliferation of 7-Tesla MRI scanners for research is putting pressure on their adoption for clinical (diagnostic) purposes as well. Already, the US Food and Drug Administration has categorized MRI up to 8T as not a significant health risk, and a clinical trial of a 7T MRI to detect amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients is […]
The current good health of the US healthcare industry contains the seeds of its own destruction, say some analysts – and it will drag the rest of the US economy down with it, unless other sectors mobilize to wrest control from the powerful healthcare lobby. Growing corporate support for government-mandated universal care may be a […]
New understanding of the genetics of immune system cells could lead to better-targeted therapies for some major diseases, including diabetes, lupus (note advances in lupus treatments covered elsewhere in this issue), and rheumatoid arthritis. New genetic understandings also open up new avenues of potential cancer therapies. For example, the discovery that genetically damaging an already […]
Tissue engineering, already on a roll at Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is adding heart valves to the list of body parts (bladders and blood vessels are already available) likely to become staples of regenerative medicine. One angineered heart valve was grown in the lab from a type of stem cell found in […]
It has been a while since we brought to your attention any breakthroughs in robotics. In part, that is because we decided to focus more pragmatically (but not exclusively) on breakthroughs that are relatively imminent, compared to scientific and technological breakthroughs in the lab that may be years away from a patient near you. We’re […]
Encouraging preliminary results have been achieved with an experimental anti-angiogenic drug for brain tumors, and Gleevec’s anti-angiogenic properties have worked to prevent prostate cancer metastasis in mice. Some relatively simple but deeply significant interventions that let the immune system run wild have shown success in killing or stabilizing melanoma in patients, and might be used […]
The prospects for artificial blood look anaemic in light of apparently negative results of a clinical trial, though there remains some fight in the company that struggled for 20 years to develop the tested product. A patent has been issued for a way to make nanoparticles for drug delivery. A slew of new drug approaches […]
The title of this publication reflects the fact that we face not one but multiple potential future states of healthcare. We have now decided to highlight every year a future that seems — on evidence from our coverage during the previous year — to be especially likely of fulfilling its potential. For 2006, our Health […]
In January 2005 it was reported that a patient benefitting from an experimental cancer drug was taken off it because it was not working for other patients in a phase I clinical trial, and it was considered too risky financially to move on to phase II trials. You might have thought then that the idea […]
