The Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years-Medical Advances
Monday, February 16, 2009PAUL KANGAS: The first MRI exam was done in the late '70s. It took over five hours to create just one image. Now, multiple images can be processed in moments. It's just one of the ways innovation touches our lives. NBR's "Bill of Health" reporter Jeff Yastine looks at where medical advances are headed.
JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Next time you visit someone in the hospital, stop by the physical rehabilitation lab. Chances are you'll see this -- patients using video games to relearn nerve and muscle control. And that says health futurist Doug Goldstein, is a growing trend. Healthy gaming goes beyond rehab. Goldstein says there's a surge in games aimed at maintaining good health and sharpening memory.
GOLDSTEIN, PRESIDENT, MEDICAL ALLIANCES: Last year in the United States, Americans spent $6.7 billion on healthy games. That includes brain fitness games, healthy eating games, exer games. So it's real dollars, it's a real market and it generates real activity and exercise.
YASTINE: Another advance: software that can catch errors in diagnosis and treatment before a mistake harms a patient. But the systems work best when all of a patient's healthcare records are digital, says Doctor Sanjaya Kumar, president of medical software developer Quantros.
SANJAYA KUMAR, CEO, QUANTROS: Things happen. Errors are due to systems issues and the only way that you can actually find out what is wrong within your system is to track and monitor and trend the appropriate data points over time.
YASTINE: And thanks to advancements in digital pathology, personalized medicine is expected to take off in coming years. Your DNA will be used to custom-design cancer therapies, drug cocktails and other treatments. That focus on the individual, say experts like Goldstein, is the key to a better quality of life.
GOLDSTEIN: Those advances have made a tremendous difference in the ability to treat and take care of illness and disease and expand lifespan. But there are many things that we can do -- an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
YASTINE: In an era when the cost of medical care continues to rise, maintaining your good health may be the biggest medical innovation of all. Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Miami.
SUSIE GHARIB: Number five on our list is DNA testing and sequencing of the human genome. It's a field that's leading to amazing medical advances. One company using those technologies to find new treatments for heart disease and spinal cord injuries is Geron. I recently sat down with Geron's CEO Thomas Okarma and began by asking him what's the next big breakthrough in medicine?
THOMAS OKARMA, CEO, GERON: We're learning how different individual patients have different manifestations of the same disease. And that we think will lead to better and more individualized treatments.
GHARIB: Tom, your company, Geron, just got the go ahead from the government to use embryonic stem cells in the first human clinical trial, which is a milestone in itself. What are the implications of that for medicine and for patients?
OKARMA: Well, to give a specific example with heart failure or heart attacks, we've learned how to make heart muscle cells from embryonic stem cells. And instead of in the future having a heart attack and going home with a damaged heart, in the future you'll go to the hospital and you'll have that damage specifically repaired by injecting new heart muscle cells. So that you go home not only with a regenerated heart muscle fixed from the damage, but it will contain new healthy cells that can also respond to today's heart drugs.
GHARIB: So how close are you to delivering on these innovations?
OKARMA: Well, we are here for spinal cord injury. This trial will start in a few months. It will be another year or two before we're ready, but the second cell type, which will probably be heart muscle cells for heart attack. Another year before we're ready to do the Type I diabetes cell type.
GHARIB: Besides what's going on in your company at Geron, what else is new in medical technology that's bubbling up?
OKARMA: Well, there are new pills. There are new drugs that are much more powerful and more specific for the disease in an individual. So we're beginning to understand how a cancer, the same cancer in you might be treated differently if I have the same tumor as you do. And that individual variation is what's going to be very important as we march forward to get over treating symptoms and focus more on eradicating the fundamentals of the disease.
GHARIB: Everyone is talking about the health care crisis and about health care reforms. Can medical innovations reform the system in terms of lowering health care costs and also promoting wellness.
OKARMA: Innovation has the potential to advance the cause of health. But unfortunately much of the recent innovation comes at a very high cost in relationship to the value added. The $100,000 cost of treatment that adds two or three weeks to the life span of a cancer patient. So we are selective in how we view innovation, not simply another step with another pill, but a phase change, a new value paradigm that completely changes outcome at a minimal increase in cost.
GHARIB: Tom, if you fast forward to the future, is it possible that there will be cures for most diseases or is that just a science fiction dream?
OKARMA: I think it's absolutely possible. The more we understand about the fundamental biology of disease, the more likely we are able to engineer a specific and permanent cure for that disease. So like any other technological advance, the more we understand about the problem, the more likely we are to find a solution that works.
GHARIB: Tom, thank you so much, great seeing you.
OKARMA: Thank you for having me.
