If the current times and everything going on in the world these days is depressing you, these innovations in medicine and technology should cheer you up.
From cancer vaccines to the solution to reversing diabetes – all these discoveries are promising and give people more confidence about the future.
Half a billion people worldwide live with diabetes. There are different types of diabetes with different causes, but they all lead to too much sugar in the blood.
Stem cell transplant could reverse diabetes
If not well controlled, this excess glucose can cause damage throughout the body, putting people at risk for gum disease, nerve damage, kidney disease, blindness, amputations, heart attack, stroke, and cancer.
Currently, patients manage the condition with drugs, insulin and lifestyle changes, but a new generation of treatments could reverse the disease, according to The Guardian. Details of the first woman to be treated for type 1 diabetes with stem cells taken from her own body have been announced recently. Previously, the 25-year-old required substantial amounts of insulin. Now she makes her own insulin.
In April of this year, a similar cell transplant allowed a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes to wean himself off insulin. It’s still early and there are still challenges, but the results so far are promising.
Cancer vaccines
Vaccines have been one of the remarkable successes of the pandemic. Now scientists hope that the same mRNA technology that underpins Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 shots can be used to “train” the immune system to recognize and attack cancer.
These injections work by “instructing” the patient’s cells to produce a certain protein that acts as a signal to the immune system. In this case, scientists adapt the vaccine model to the proteins on the surface of the patient’s cancer cells.
Artificial Intelligence will help detect cancers faster
The next four years will see rapid advances in the use of Artificial Intelligence to better diagnose serious diseases such as lung cancers and brain tumors, which should mean longer lives.
The technology is being rolled out in hospitals, including several in the north of England, to catch cancers faster and extend lives. The system, which scans X-rays and prioritizes cases where it detects something suspicious that a human doctor might have missed, has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy by 45% and diagnostic efficiency by 12%.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
