'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
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Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#2In my opinion the most important medical advance that happened was reversing methylation based age indicator for the first time in a human. It's a bit sad to not see something so important on this list.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#3Mentions phage therapy as a one liner. Kept alive on life support (metaphorically) by Soviet scientists across the life of the antibiotics era which increasingly feels like it too is on life support.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#4In my opinion the most important medical advance that happened was reversing methylation based age indicator for the first time in a human. It's a bit sad to not see something so important on this list.
For anyone curious, I believe this is the relevant paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6826138/
And a blog post about it: https://www.activemotif.com/blog-reversing-epigenetic-age
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#5Mentions phage therapy as a one liner. Kept alive on life support (metaphorically) by Soviet scientists across the life of the antibiotics era which increasingly feels like it too is on life support.
I heard about that many years ago, but isn't it something that fundamentally has to be customized rather than mass produced? Of course, there are other therapies these days that are as well.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#6The biggest breakthrough for me would also be free medicines and Universal healthcare for everyone.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#7Mentions phage therapy as a one liner. Kept alive on life support (metaphorically) by Soviet scientists across the life of the antibiotics era which increasingly feels like it too is on life support.
I heard about that many years ago, but isn't it something that fundamentally has to be customized rather than mass produced? Of course, there are other therapies these days that are as well.
Customized to the bacteria it should kill, not the patient.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#8In my opinion the most important medical advance that happened was reversing methylation based age indicator for the first time in a human. It's a bit sad to not see something so important on this list.
N=10 though... And needs to be reproduced ideally.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#9The biggest breakthrough for me would also be free medicines and Universal healthcare for everyone.
It's much less sexy than some of these technologies but universal access to Canadian-quality & cost healthcare worldwide (including in the US) would save so many more lives than some esoteric phage treatment that will surely cost $1M/patient.
Re: 'Man on the Moon' moment – the year's big breakthroughs in medicine
#10> But doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital attempted an untested "phage therapy", which uses viruses to infect and kill bacteria. Phage-therapy never became mainstream medicine and the field was eclipsed by the discovery of antibiotics, which are much easier to use.
Yes, phage therapy quickly disappeared after antibiotics were discovered. At the time, antibiotics were more convenient as they usually help against a wide range of bacteria while with phages you need to specifically test which phage works best for the strand you want to fight. It takes days with phages vs minutes with antibiotics.
The co-discoverer of phages went to georgia and helped establish phage research at a medical institue [1]. The institute survived through the horrible times of stalin and later it became of strategic importance as the west didn't share antibiotics with the soviet union. Due to the strategic importance, samples had to be sent to the institute from all over the soviet union and now the institute has one of the largest phage collections in the world. It has continued giving phage therapies to patients for decades, up until this day. Definitely not mainstream but don't call it untested!