5G tech connects patients to practitioners
Two operations at Shanghai-based Huashan Hospital were streamed in real-time through 5G this week, with a hospital director explaining the difficulties and highlights of the procedures on the spot. Though live-streaming is already widespread through 4G, it is not enough for activities which require high-definition.
Many see great potential for using 5G in smart medical care that involves live-streaming, remote diagnosis, mobile medical facilities and AI.
Life science in general and medicine in particular are some of the fastest growing and most heavily invested fields in China.
China has 250 million people aged over 60, close to 18 percent of the population, putting ever-increasing pressure on life science research and industries.
At a recent forum hosted by DeepTech, a technology service provider, 10 hot trends in the field were discussed by scientists and investors.
“China has great demand in many areas of life science, due to its large ageing population. Scientists and firms have been developing very quickly in the last few years, and China’s achievements in the field can also be a contribution to the world,” said Jason Pontin, senior partner at Flagship Pioneering, a Massachusetts venture-capital firm specializing in healthcare.
He added that China has advantages in smart medical care, especially involving artificial intelligence, an area that China leads the world.
Pontin, a veteran technology journalist and venture capitalist, was invited to the forum to explain the 10 DeepTech trends: brain-computer interfaces, CRISPR, immunotherapy 2.0, non-invasive early diagnosis, nucleic acid drugs, rare diseases, big gene data, single-cell multiomics, smart medical care and synthetic bio-technology.
“We are still facing many challenges in industrializing CAR-T treatment, as well as in other areas,” said Wang Liqun, CEO of Fosun Kite, which is dedicated to innovative cell therapy and has been developing CAR-T technology for treatment of patients with lymphoma.
“Some people always say our technology and industry lag behind many developed countries. Others blindly consider China to be number one everywhere. Neither is true. CAR-T is a very new, revolutionary treatment and technology, which means everyone in the world is starting at the same baseline. It is also true that we still have space to improve in terms of productivity, quality and budget,” said Wang.
Curing cancer
Of the 10 trends, some are more directly relevant to our everyday lives, while others seem more hardcore and remote at a first glance, though with the potential to move closer to home in the near future.
For example, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to James Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their contributions to immunotherapy in curing cancer. The relatively new therapy got world-wide attention when former US president Jimmy Carter announced at the end of 2015 that he became “cancer free” from advanced melanoma, after various treatments that included surgery, radiation and a new immunotherapy drug.
“Now there are hundreds of institutions and companies dedicated to immunotherapy around the world, and quite a few in China,” Pontin explained. “It has been proved quite effective, yet too costly. But I think it will definitely become more affordable in the next few years.”
Big gene data is an example of how a new and relatively expensive technology became more affordable and popular in just a little over 10 years.
When the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, it was the world’s largest collaborative biological project, intended to determine the sequence of nucleotide base pairs that make up human DNA, and to identify and map all of genes of the human genome. Each test initially cost millions of dollars but costs gradually decreased and the project was declared complete in April 2013.
Today, DNA tests directed at individual consumers have become a multi-billion dollar business, with the cost of tests down to just a few hundred dollars or even less. The procedures are increasingly more convenient and those interested are having themselves tested for a wide range items from inheritable diseases to “fat genes.”