From digital diagnosis to gut microbiome: What does the future of healthcare look like?

By Donna Duggan

From digital diagnosis to gut microbiome: What does the future of healthcare look like?
Cutting-edge breakthroughs in everything from the gut microbiome and digital apps to RNA are shaping the future of healthcare in exciting ways.

Digital innovation

Healthcare is entering the high-tech age. According to the HIMSS Future of Healthcare Report, 80 per cent of healthcare providers plan to increase investment in technology and digital solutions over the next five years. From the growth of condition-specific digital apps to extender reality – the latter a combination of human and computer-generated graphics interaction – digital innovation is transforming the healthcare industry.

Since the arrival of COVID-19, telehealth use has grown significantly, transforming the way healthcare is delivered. Tech companies are developing ways to securely integrate telehealth with electronic medical records so healthcare professionals can assess patients with access to their full case history.

Dr Alline Beleigoli, Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, says this could be supported by a range of real-world data, including smart home equipment or personal devices that monitor everything from a person’s blood pressure to their heart rate, sleeping patterns or number of steps per day.

Live biotherapeutics

How to look after your microbiome is one of the big topics in modern health. The microbiome refers to the trillions of micro- organisms that colonise the human body. The bacteria that colonise the human gastro- intestinal tract – known as the gut microbiome – play an important role in health and disease.

The gut microbiome is a collection of around 2kg of bacteria and there are more microbial cells in the gut than in the rest of the entire human body. The gut microbiome is commonly understood to influence gastrointestinal diseases, however it can also impact diseases in other locations of the body.

While foods and supplements containing probiotics have been used to improve health for many years, it was only recently that Live Biotherapeutics Products (LBP) were categorised and regulated as a class of medicines, defining LBP as a drug product which contain live organisms, such as bacteria that is intended to prevent or treat disease.

Since the regulation there has been much research and drug development into the therapeutic use of LBP – from drugs to overcome immunosuppression, to research into how LBP can have an anti-tumorigenic effect.

RNA therapy

You might have heard ‘RNA’ in the news recently because of COVID-19. Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are RNA-based treatments and have ushered a new wave of RNA-based therapies into the mainstream of drug development.

For instance, the Pfizer vaccine is a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, using RNA to make your body’s cells produce the coronavirus’ specific spike protein.

But what is RNA? Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is present in all living cells. As well as carrying instructions for making proteins, RNAs help to turn genes on and off, aid chemical reactions and carry the genetic code in some viruses. Important connections have been discovered between RNA and human disease, including cancer and various neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

RNA therapy is a term used to describe the use of treatments that target RNA. There are many RNA-based therapies and diagnostics being developed for different diseases including COVID-19.

One heavily researched area is complex or rare genetic diseases, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). NSCLC represents 80-85% of the worldwide lung cancer cases, which are the leading cause of cancer-related death. (Tobacco smoking remains the main risk factor for developing this disease.)

Several clinical trials have indicated better survival rates in NSCLC patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) antibodies.

Recent studies have indicated that RNAs both positively and negatively regulate lung cancer cell proliferation and that RNAs could be promising biomarkers and targets for lung cancer therapies

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