synthetic biology – The Health Care Blog

The Times They Are A-Changing….Fast

Sep 14, 2023

By KIM BELLARD

If you have been following my Twitter – oops, I mean “X” – feed lately, you may have noticed that I’ve been emphasizing The Coming Wave, the new book from Mustafa Suleyman (with Michael Bhaskar). If you have not yet read it, or at least ordered it, I urge you to do so, because, frankly, our lives are not going to be the same, at all. And we’re woefully unprepared.

One thing I especially appreciated is that, although he made his reputation in artificial intelligence, Mr. Suleyman doesn’t only focus on AI. He also discusses synthetic biology, quantum computing, robotics, and new energy technologies as ones that stand to radically change our lives. What they have in common is that they have hugely asymmetric impacts, they display hyper-evolution, they are often omni-use, and they increasingly demonstrate autonomy.

In other words, these technologies can do things we didn’t know they could do, have impacts we didn’t expect (and may not want), and may decide what to do on their own.

To build an AI, for the near future one needs a significant amount of computing power, using specialized chips and a large amount of data, but with synthetic biology, the technology is getting to the point where someone can set up a lab in their garage and experiment away. AI can spread rapidly, but it needs a connected device; engineered organisms can get anywhere there is air or water.

“A pandemic virus synthesized anywhere will spread everywhere,” MIT”s Kevin Esvelt told Axios.

I’ve been fascinated with synthetic biology for some time now, and yet I still think we’re not paying enough attention. “For me, the most exciting thing about synthetic biology is finding or seeing unique ways that living organisms can solve a problem,” David Riglar, Sir Henry Dale research fellow at Imperial College London, told The Scientist. “This offers us opportunities to do things that would otherwise be impossible with non-living alternatives.”

Jim Collins, Termeer professor of medical engineering and science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), added: “By approaching biology as an engineering discipline, we are now beginning to create programmable medicines and diagnostic tools with the ability to sense and dynamically respond to information in our bodies.”

For example, researchers just reported on a smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — that can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.

Our Plants Should Be Plants

Nov 15, 2022

BY KIM BELLARD

It seems like most of my healthcare Twitter buddies are enjoying themselves at HLTH2022, so I don’t suppose it much matters what I write about, because they’ll all be too busy to read it anyway. That’s too bad, because I was sparked by an article on one of my favorite topics: synthetic biology.

Elliot Hershberg, a Ph.D. geneticist who describes his mission as “to accelerate the Century of Biology,” has a great article on his Substack: Atoms are local. The key insight for me was his point that, while we’ve been recognizing the power of biology, we’ve been going about it the wrong way. Instead of the industrialization of biology, he thinks, we should be seeking the biologization of industry.

His point:

Many people default to a mindset of industrialization. But, why naively inherit a metaphor that dominated 19th century Britain? Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform. We are keen to explore and make true future biotechnologies that enable people to more directly and freely make whatever they need where-ever they are.

The Most Important Thing

Jul 27, 2021• 1

By KIM BELLARD

Jack Dorsey has some big hopes for bitcoin. In a webinar last week, he said: “My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace.” The previous week Mr. Dorsey announced Square was starting a decentralized financial services (DeFi) business based on bitcoin, joining the previously announced Square bitcoin wallet.

None of this should be a surprise. At the Bitcoin 2021 conference in June, Mr. Dorsey said: “Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. I don’t think there is anything more important in my lifetime to work on.”

I’m impressed that someone with as many accomplishments as Jack Dorsey picks something not obviously related to those accomplishments and decides it is the most important thing he could work on. So, of course, I had to wonder: what might accomplished people in healthcare say was the most important thing they wanted to be working on?

For many these days, of course, it is the COVID-19 pandemic. Not much has had a higher priority. Highly effective vaccines have been developed, COVID-19 treatments have greatly improved, supply chains have been adjusted and readjusted, and countless public health measures have been tried. Healthcare professionals have worked themselves to extremes.

For others, perhaps, it would be to address the extreme financial hardships the U.S. healthcare system can cause. A new study in JAMA confirmed what is hiding in plain sight – hundreds of billions of medical debt. Debt continued to rise despite ACA, especially in states that perversely chose not to expand Medicaid. Efforts such as requiring hospital “price transparency” have largely failed. Many large hospital systems continue to sue patients who can’t pay. These hardships are unfair, immoral, and unique to the U.S.; addressing them should be important.

However, both the pandemic and financial obstacles contributed to, but did not cause, the big health inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. People of color, people in lower socioeconomic classes, even women all face numerous inequities in the health care they receive and in the health they achieve. These may reflect broader social inequities, but no one in healthcare should look at these without wanting to address them.

Digital health has never been hotter. The pandemic reminded people how valuable telehealth can be, and investors are pouring money into digital health at astounding levels – some $19b in the first half of 2021 alone. We may be in bit of a manic phase right now, but few doubt that digital health is going to be a big part of healthcare’s future.

Then there’s artificial intelligence (A.I.). No industry in 2021 can be ignoring it. Some well-publicized mishaps with IBM’s Watson or Babylon Health notwithstanding, A.I. in healthcare has already made impressive strides, such as DeepMind’s recent protein predictions or its successes in imaging. A.I. is going to be built into our health care in the future, either in a supporting role or directly, and working on it has to be on many people’s wish list.