In the coming future, everything will be cheaper to extract, make or synthesize because of automation.
Human labor will be replaced by a lot of robotics.
Energy prices will be way cheaper because of solar photovoltaics and energy storage across the globe.
Transportation costs will be cheaper and affordable due to autonomous electric vehicles on the road.
If you don’t believe it, just look back thirty years ago and check the price of a cell phone and compare its price with current price and it’s accessibility now and how many things you can do with your cell phone.
So then what about our health and longevity in the future?
Let’s explore a little bit about this and understand why we catch chronic diseases like cancer and how to tackle them in the future.
Aging and chronic health problems
When we age, it’s not only that we have a high chance of cancer or lung disease or heart disease or any other chronic disease but also
our body automatically just starts weakening or breaking down, same like rusting our old car.
Aubrey de Grey, a renowned biomedical gerontologist says, “aging is like wear and tear on the engine of an automobile. It is damage that accumulates as a result of the system’s normal operation.”
In our body, we have cellular metabolism to produce energy to stay alive and functional.
We also have cellular reproduction for self-replication as a natural phenomenon.
These cellular metabolisms generate a lot of waste in and around the cells and that damages various internal organs through oxidation exactly like rusting an old car.
Relatively, at young age, waste removal as well as repair processes are smooth and regular but at old age, these processes are not smooth.
Consequently, many errors accumulate and the body cannot fix all of them.
This damage or error might cause fatal issues like cancer, Alzheimer’s, parkinson and heart diseases.
The challenge now is how to preserve life as we are technologically so sophisticated.
Preserving life means extending as well as improving it.
The process for the development of new health treatments is changing rapidly from trial and error process of drug design to an exponential information technology so that we can systematically reprogram the suboptimal software of our life.
Cancer and other neurodegenerative diseases appeared later in our life when we started to live longer and our immunity started to fall apart.
They are mainly caused due to misfolded proteins called prions and other reasons.
Current information technology is nothing but sharing ideas to fulfill human potential and to solve many social problems including biological and medical issues.
The key of information technology is artificial intelligence AI that is taking us from linear advancement to exponential advancement in understanding these complex biological issues to treat and cure these chronic diseases.
AI and nanorobots for our longevity
The use of AI for discovery and design of both drugs and other interventions are coming rapidly.
We can find key safety and efficacy data in hours from simulated in silico trials whereas only human trials take years to get these data.
Ray Kurzweil, a world class inventor, thinker, author, and futurist says, “if we put nanorobots inside our body, we can repair the damage caused by aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues.”
He is one of my favorite authors and his latest book “The Singularity Is Nearer ” is a must read for those who always hope for a better and healthy future.
Aging degrades our organ performance but the nanobots will repair and strengthen them.
Nanorobots can be programmed to damage all types of pathogens, they can be also used to treat metabolic diseases.
They will help to keep substances into our blood supply or lymph system, for example, our entire digestive system supplies nutrients into the blood.
They might remove substances from our blood supply.
It might be the same as our lungs taking in oxygen and taking out carbon dioxide, similarly, the liver and kidneys remove toxins.
Pancreas produce hormones to control metabolism, change in hormone is the cause of diabetes, as we know, type 1 diabetes occurs because pancreatic islet cells cannot produce insulins.
Except our heart and brain, all of our major internal organs can keep substances in and out of the blood supply and many health problems result from their malfunction.
If we use medical nanorobots, they can monitor the blood flow and can also increase or decrease hormones, oxygen, nutrients, and toxins by mimicking the function of internal organs.
This technology will solve the problems of diseases and aging in the near future.
Nanobots will monitor, supply, and adjust these different substances so that our organs maintain good shape and ultimately we will be able to optimize our biology for longevity.
Cancer and more hope for the future
Cancer is a chronic problem for humanity and spreading like wildfire across the globe.
Do you know that we are always developing cancers in our body all the time.
But our immune system finds them at a very early stage and defeats them completely.
It’s only when our immune system fails to defeat and cancer enters inside our body.
A very strong performing immune system is one of the most important ways to defend against cancer, and virtually all chronic diseases.
Muscle is the largest endocrine organ in our body and research shows that people with strong muscle mass have a significantly lower incidence of cancer and other illnesses.
Higher the muscle mass creates the higher immune function in our body and the longer we live.
Nowadays, we know more about what’s going on inside our car or microwave or cell phone but we don’t know much about our body because of its complex biochemical pathways.
The problem is, it’s often too late by the time we find something wrong inside our body, especially cancers.
Eighty percent of cancers don’t have any screening mechanisms or tools to detect.
Many cancers like pancreatic and ovarian are so deadly because they are frequently detected very late.
Cancer is hard to remove because each cancer cell can self-replicate so that every single cell has to be removed from the body.
At some point, each cell can develop resistance to the body’s immune cells and any kind of treatment can destroy most cancer cells but after some time new tumors can grow again.
The problem of chemotherapy is that it cannot cure cancer entirely and can damage non cancerous cells. The biggest challenge of chemotherapy is that it also weakens our immune system.
Up to now our medical science has an incomplete molecular understanding of how cancer evades our immune system.
Our natural immune system includes T cells that can destroy bad microorganisms and without them, we cannot survive longer.
Hopefully, AI biological simulators will be advanced to break this poor understanding between cancer and immunity.
One alternative for radical life extension and cancer treatment in the near future is possible by medical nanorobots. The major development and extension will be in the area of our immune system.
Medical nanobots can examine each individual cell and can determine if it is cancerous or not.
If we are able to selectively repair or destroy individual cells, we can manipulate our biology and the medicine will work effectively and selectively.
Manipulation of biology means we can control our genes because cells self replicate by copying the DNA in each nucleus.
At the moment, immunotherapy is serving many stage 4 terminal cancer patients to go into remission which is encouraging development in cancer treatment.
CAR-T cell therapy technology is a clear example, it can reprogram a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells.
We now have induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which can rejuvenate the heart after a heart attack.
We can grow organs using iPS cells.
These are adult cells which are converted into stem cells by the introduction of specific genes.
These iPS cells have been used for the regeneration of tracheas, bones, retinal cells, nerves, and tissues from heart, liver, and kidneys.
Dr. Silviu Itescu, CEO of Mesoblast, and professor of Columbia University Medical Center says, “The bone marrow in our body contains a homegrown pantry of non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory medicines.”
The native stem cells in bone marrow are also known as mesenchymal precursor cells, the body’s most versatile and potent building blocks. They differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle or fat whatever we need.
After an injury, they are crucial because of two reasons: they keep inflammation within normal healthy range and they repair damaged tissue.
Scientists regard inflammation as a key culprit in aging and specifically in cancer.
The problem is that stem cells grow scarcer with age especially with people with chronic diseases.
Dr. Bob Hariri, an accomplished surgeon and biomedical scientist, pioneered in using NK cells to combat cancer.
His company, Celularity harvests NK cells from human placentas.
He says, “The placenta is often regarded as a throwaway organ, but it is packed with stem cells as well as NK cells. They are more youthful than those found in the bone marrow of adults or even children.”
Stem cells are somehow similar to cancer cells, the challenge is how to find ways to minimize the risk of uncontrolled cell division.
The good news is these iPS cells can behave like embryonic stem cells and can differentiate into almost all types of human cells.
When we know the mechanism of iPS action with advanced AI, regenerative medicine will identify the body’s own secret for healing.
Jeff Huber, CEO of GRAIL, whose mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured, has developed a blood test for cancers.
GRAIL developed a blood based screening test called Galleri, which could detect more than 50 types of cancer.
This test searches for tiny fragments of DNA and RNA that have been released into the bloodstream by a tumor and that reflects the tumor’s genomic features.
GRAIL’s technology is so sensitive that it can detect even a faint signal that an early tumor exists.
Conclusion
Let’s hope that exponential technological development interfaced with cheaper computing power, biotechnology, nanotechnology along with AI will help us to understand our biology better and defeat cancer and other chronic diseases.
The fundamental components of our living body like genes, proteins, and cells are changing into tools, as biology is appearing as technology, to shape and improve our life.
Our body, obviously, is a collection of cells and the better understanding and function of these cells with the help of these new technologies will bring multi-cancer early detection and cure.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.