EmTech, short for Emerging Technologies, has established itself as a leading event for experts at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For the third European edition of the congress, whose slogan is “Whatever the problem, technology is part of the solution,” Valencia, Spain, was selected as a venue.
“Surgeons have worked exclusively in personalized medicine over the past few centuries, but now technology allows for medicine based on the characteristics of each individual, not just genetics, but also behavior, desires and expectations”, said Julio Mayol, Director of the Innovation Unit at the San Carlos Clinical Hospital, who was moderating the conference “Genomics, image and data: the future of personalized medicine”.
The panel, which was held on November 5th, made it clear that knowing more about the genes associated with the development of diseases would help to improve diagnosis and treatment and understanding the effect of the transcriptome and the epigenome would also be key. In this regard, precision genomics, Big Data on the characteristics and development of patients, and innovation will be essential for decision making in clinical practice.
For this reason, before thinking of the technologies that need to be invented, it is necessary to make current health problems the focus of innovation and analyze the effects of solving them.
Ana Conesa, Director of the Genomics of Genetic Expression at the Príncipe Felipe Research Center, spoke about the complexity of precision genomics today: “Sequencing is becoming fairly easy, it costs about the same as a face lift”. However, she noted that although at first genes associated with diseases would be identified, on many occasions, it is alterations in various genes cause the disease.
After Conesa came Martha Gray, a professor at the Health Sciences and Technology Division at Harvard-MIT, who argued that innovation in medicine should be motivated by real needs.
Gray explained that the methodology being implemented by the M+Vision division, called “idea3”, is based on considering problems whose solution might make a big difference. As an example of the application of this method, the professor mentioned the creation of a rapid glasses prescription system. “It’s one of the most profitable healthcare technologies, but there aren’t enough professionals qualified to prescribe new glasses”, she said.
During the closing ceremony, Leo Celi, the founder and director of MIT Sana, warned that the current paradigm for best practice wasn’t enough: “The medical practice needs radical transformation that could arise from the proper management of large amounts of medical data and collaborative work between doctors and data scientists”.
“No-one is analyzing the data being collected every day. The practice of medicine shouldn’t be based on evidence but on building the evidence itself”, said Celi. Then he explained how an intelligent multi-parameter monitoring system would work to optimize the management of intensive care units, cross-referencing data from laboratories and digital records in the health system.
Furthermore, the founder of MIT Sana encouraged the use of large clinical databases: “These are fundamental for personalizing recommendations and calculating the balance between the risks and benefits of each test and intervention, and for seeking out new knowledge that makes it possible to understand disease processes in greater depth”.
In the future, according to Celi, the prescription of a treatment should not be based on what a doctor knows but what hundreds of doctors monitoring other patients and seeking the best result in each case are doing.
Finally, the director of MIT Sana emphasized the need for prior identification of patients who will respond to a particular therapy and which won’t. “Genomics isn’t enough, we must also base it on phenomenology, or the analysis of electronic medical data to seek patterns of response to treatment – instead of seeking bio-markers one by one,” he concluded.
