The Future Of Medicine: Creating A Real Time Diagnostic Lab Inside The Body Using Smart Tissue Implants
The conventional ways of diagnosing diseases in patients is usually done from the outside, i.e. scanning a patient’s blood and body using blood tests or MRIs to find diseases and diseased tissues.
A biopsy, as it’s called in medical terms, removes a tissue in order to check if it’s infected. However, this approach can’t work all the time because firstly, some tissues, like brains or spinal cords, can’t be routinely biopsied. And secondly, doctors often don’t know which tissue is causing the problem, so they don’t know what to biopsy.
So what if, instead of taking an ‘outside-in’ approach using conventional medical procedures, we could instead take an ‘inside-out’ approach to monitor people’s health in real time?
The future of medical diagnosis using this ‘inside-out’ approach is being developed currently in the US. The idea is for doctors to plant engineered smart tissues inside a patient’s body which can then give an immune response and provide all the diagnostic details needed by doctors at a cellular level. This can provide diagnostic information and data in real-time from inside the patient’s body and this would completely eradicate the needs for outside tests currently done using conventional means.
According to Aaron Morris, who is developing these smart tissue implants to monitor diseases in patients explains the technology he’s developing and the problem it solves:
“We need to rethink how we see. My coworkers at the University of Michigan and I decided to do just that. Instead of taking an outside-in approach to diagnostics, we’re taking an inside-out approach. We are creating implantable sites that have similarities to other sites in the body, and will improve our vision by giving us real-time access to molecular and cellular information about diseased tissues. These insights will enable us to predict the onset of disease and even identify therapies likely to work in an individual patient.”,
How This Technology Works & The Future
“So what does this inside-out approach look like? Step one is to engineer new tissues just under the skin. These tissues have similarities to other inaccessible sites in the body, like the brain or the lungs. By implanting a porous plastic disk made of FDA-approved biomaterials, We can harness the body’s natural responses to allow cells to migrate into the disk, survive at the site and form a tissue. Eventually, we’re left with an engineered tissue with integrated immune cells, just the cells we need for diagnosis. Although these tissues are complex and chronically inflamed, they’re also innocuous and after a few weeks, nearly imperceptible. Our engineered tissues contain information not present in the blood, and they can help bridge the gap between what we can see on a traditional test and cellular changes we know occur in disease.”
“Step two is to read this signal. Currently, I could take a biopsy of my engineered site and analyze it because I made them accessible just under the skin. But it would certainly be better if we could incorporate and read a sensor noninvasively. Within the next decade, rapidly converging technologies could enable diagnosis at such an implant by harnessing simple detectors, like a blood pressure cuff or smartwatch does now. The mechanisms for diagnosing and monitoring disease could be as simple as opening an app, like Candy Crush on your phone.”
“Step three is to harness the huge array of knowledge in fields like engineering and material science to improve these implants and our ability to read their data. Eventually, tens, if not hundreds of individual engineered tissues with integrated sensors may be implantable with a single application.”
This kind of implanted smart tissue technology is set to revolutionize how diagnosis & treatment is done all over the world.
It would provide constant real-time updates of all changes in the body at a cellular level and in real-time which can help doctors prevent disease and treat patients much earlier rather later, i.e. after the patient contracts a disease.
It would completely eradicate the need for constant blood tests and MRIs and other tests used by doctors to find diseases and diagnose patients.
As Morris says,
“Now, this approach to diagnosis is unconventional, to be sure, but it is robust. So far, my colleagues and I have used it to diagnose models of metastatic cancer, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and organ transplant rejection. But this is just the beginning of what we can see. With continuous improvements, we will be able to truly create a diagnostic lab inside your body that provides a continuous analysis of your health. By changing how we see what’s going wrong in patients, we will be able to diagnose and treat diseases better and faster than ever before. If you’re willing to rethink how you see, you may be surprised what comes into view.”
Just like I had explained in an old post of mine about The Next Revolution Of Programming: Programming Biological Cells, this technology, when it’s fully developed, will certainly transform medicine and the conventional methods of diagnosis and treatment in today’s day and age.
In his TED Talk, Aaron Morris explains how this smart tissue tech that he’s developing at the University Of Michigan works, the problems it solves and how it will change medicine & how we treat patients for the foreseeable future.
