Into the future Flashcards
How will the future impact our cardiopulmonary health?
Pollution expected to reduce, increasing air quality in most countries, this can result in less pollution related respiratory diseases. This is not the case for much of the developing world. Reduction in smoking is expected so less COPD and heart disease. Improved diet leads to better general health but we have an obesity crisi atm which is bad for heart conditions. Increasing access to internet and technology means better health monitoring and delivery but alternative medicine -> less compliance
Describe the idea of precision medicine
Within any given disease, different sub populations of patients will have different pathophysiological profiles, which is probably linked to different responses to treatment and clinical phenotypes. Therefore precision medicine refers to personalising healthcare based on disease characteristics, tailoring practice, diagnoses, decisions, treatments and products to the patient
Describe the idea and uses of organs on a chip
Cell lines are not a great model for testing drugs, and animals are not representative of humans. The main idea is to create a human from interconnected organs on chips. They’re used in order to test drugs and other stuff in conditions that may resemble a complex human physiological system
Describe the set-up of an organ on a chip
Microfluidic device that contains small channels lined with human epithelial cells and culture medium flowing through allowing co-culture of different human cells to mimic human systems. Imperial’s pulmonary artery on a chip is where the channel contains a thin porous membrane with smooth muscle and epithelia on opposite sides. Using the patient’s blood and cells in this chip can allow for personalised care
Describe the process of 3D printing and bioprinting, describing the drawbacks of bioprinting
3D is where successive layers of a polymer are printed onto a surface according to a computer programme to build a 3D model. Bioprinting is the same but with human cells, which can lead to the creation of organs etc. However, we are a long way off recreating the complexities of brain etc. Many cells die in the printing process, and we can’t recreate blood vessels and intracellular connections within the organ
Describe some future applications of bioprinting
Can be printed directly onto wounds, where the wound is first scanned. Cells and GFs in a biomaterial scaffold will be printed directly onto the wound, Imperial having developed a biomaterial that is super sticky derived from slug defensive mucus. Bioprinting can also be coupled with gene therapy and drug delivery in order to impant modified cells into the patient, as well as using the patient’s own cells in the bioprinting process.
Describe the idea of an eNose
Electronic sensing refers to using sensor arrays and pattern recognition systems to recreate human senses. The eNose can be used to analyse exhaled breath to detect lung disease. May be able to sense cancer from VOCs, and bacterial and viral COPD exacerbations
Describe how an iKnife works
The heated knife burns tissue during surgery, the smoke is sucked into a mass spectrometer, where chemical composition is analysed and the knife can tell if its operating on tumour or normal tissue. Allows removal of all cancerous tissue.
