The future is full of crazy science, including some crazy medical ideas to transform healthcare.
Even when a specific idea fails, strange advances often branch out into unexpected discoveries—like insulin, penicillin, and Viagra (yes, Viagra saves lives).
So can we even predict how these remarkable futuristic advances will help humanity live longer or better?
Related: 10 Most Persistent Health Myths and Why They’re False
10 Titanium hearts with magnetic rotors
An Australian man recently made health history by surviving for 100 days with a titanium heart before receiving a donor organ.
It’s a world first and a promising advance for the roughly 6.7 million Americans facing heart failure. The titanium heart is not a permanent cyberpunk-like solution, but a stopgap measure until a patient can receive a heart transplant.
It’s called BiVACORand it could eventually become a permanent solution for people who cannot receive a donor heart due to age or other health problems.
This titanium heart pump works by means of a magnetically suspended rotor that pulses blood throughout the circulatory system. It includes a cord that plugs into a power supply, such as next to one’s Rivian or sonic toothbrush. And since it only has a single moving part, it is much more reliable and less likely to break than, say, a blender.[1]
9 Brain chips to reveal brain development in real time
Despite their sinister connotations, brain chips could reveal some of the brain’s greatest mysteries. So Harvard researchers are testing a “soft, thin, stretchable bioelectronic device” implanted in a tadpole’s neural plate.
The neural plate is a flat structure that, like meat origami, folds into two 3D structures: the brain and the spinal cord. Vitally, the researchers showed that they could do this without affecting the tadpole’s development or behavior. This tiny electrode array can then monitor electrical activity from individual brain cells with “millisecond precision.”
This concept, scaled to other creatures, could one day provide unprecedented glimpses of brain development. For example, tracking the electrical activities associated with conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder during early development could provide revolutionary insights and treatments.[2]
8 King Tut’s Curse is transformed into King Tut’s Treasure
The infamous “Pharaoh’s Curse” has become a cancer-fighting tool thanks to engineers from the University of Pennsylvania.
A century after cigar-smoking archaeologists opened the seal of the tomb Tutankhamenit still reveals hidden treasures. A team led by Penn isolated a “new class of molecules” from the deadly fungus associated with the closure of ancient Egyptian tombs.
Aspergillus flavus is a crop fungus linked to the deaths of excavation team members exploring King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s. Now researchers have isolated and modified peptides from the “Pharaoh’s Curse” fungus to kill leukemia cells and plan to test their potency in animals and humans. Most importantly, it gives medical science a new way to isolate beneficial compounds from otherwise deadly pathogens.[3]
7 AI for heart health
Echocardiography uses sound waves to visualize the heart and its function, measure blood flow and other important indicators of well-being or disease.
The hard part is the analysis, which requires a “tremendous amount of clinical time from highly skilled readers” to make sense of the data and iron out any potential hiccups in heart function.
To speed up this process, researchers are developing an AI model that can analyze echocardiograms in minutes.
Called PanEchoit was trained on nearly 1 million echocardiographic videos and validated on external datasets and with more than 5,000 patients. Although it still needs a human to work with it, AI analyzes many views of the heart simultaneously and can accurately assess a wide range of conditions.[4]
6 Using pig and human cells to grow teeth
A full set of teeth is not only aesthetically pleasing – it can help us conquer our favorite snacks. But once we’ve lost an adult tooth, there’s no way for it to grow back… yet.
Therefore, researchers from the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine used human and pig cells to trigger the early growth of human-like teeth in pig jawbones from slaughterhouses.
It’s a neat advance that could eventually allow humans to replace lost chompers with real, living, bioengineered tissue. The advantages are many because current dental implants have a titanium (usually) base that is anchored in the jawbone.
However, bioengineered replacement teeth provide better cushioning during chewing and support healthy bone turnover in the jaw, while also providing sensory feedback because they have nerves.
The trick is to get the right cells to develop into the many tissues of the tooth, including the white enamel layer on top and the dentin, the hard bulk of the tooth.[5]
5 Fat-busting “Boba” beads
The world is gaining weight – to put it politely – leading to poor health outcomes and skyrocketing healthcare costs.
Unfortunately, options for accelerated fat loss may involve gastric bypass surgery, medications that cause diarrhea, or daily appetite suppressant injections.
Now, an innovation from Sichuan University offers another way: fat-busting microbeads that show promise in mice. The pearls are made from green tea compounds and vitamin E, then wrapped in a seaweed fabric.
Once ingested, they expand in the gut, trap fat particles and then be excreted. In tests, rats treated with these beads lost up to 17% of their body weight. For humans, such pearls may one day be added to desserts or bubble teas, like tapioca pearls, since there’s already a boba place on every corner.[6]
4 Portable “robots” for rehabilitation
Neurodegenerative diseases are a nightmare. They rob people of their daily freedom and can develop despite the most careful health care efforts.
Those with neurodegenerative diseases or people who have had a stroke may no longer be able to brush their teeth, comb their hair, dress themselves or even eat. To help them, Harvard researchers are developing a soft, wearable robotic device that goes over the shoulders, chest and upper arms.
The device assists with upper body movements and uses machine learning to provide tailored support based on the individual’s needs. As a result, such wearable technologies can be used both for rehabilitation and to help people regain their daily freedom.[7]
3 Lab-Made Mucus Heals Injured Guts
Hydrogels are gelatin-like materials that absorb a lot of water and turn into fake slime.
This artificial slime is not made for news outlets, but for health care. Hydrogels are good at slowly releasing drugs into the bloodstream, but they are broken down by stomach acid if taken orally. Yet a new type of artificial substance, based on gastric mucus, is designed to resist acid breakdown.
This “ultrastable mucus-inspired hydrogel” (UMIH) is a gentle, jelly-like material that can coat the inside of the intestine to heal ulcers and other gastrointestinal wounds in humans and animals.[8]
2 A pacifier that is also a baby monitor
Our homes are already full of sensors. The future will be filled with even more hidden sensors, but some will hopefully improve our health – like the baby-enhancing bioelectronic pacifier.
Babysitting is an important application for biosensing because young children cannot tell us exactly how they feel. In addition, current technology for monitoring infant health is bulky or requires blood sampling, which is painful.
But the bioelectronic pacifier, developed by Georgia Tech, can continuously monitor electrolyte levels to check on infants’ health in real time. A pacifier is the perfect option as it can easily be outfitted with technology and turned into a standalone, wireless, non-invasive health tracker – especially for babies in intensive care units.[9]
1 Brain Zappers to treat Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. Yet it is often difficult to detect the onset of this disease, and unfortunately there is no cure – only treatment.
But there is some treatment hope gaining traction for mental disorders, including depression: zapping the brain with electricity.
Technically, it’s more of a stimulatory effect than a zap, called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). It is not painful or overly invasive as it is administered by placing a series of electrodes on a patient’s head to deliver low-intensity electrical current.
After two 30-minute sessions a day, patients showed cognitive improvements. Researchers say this may be because the electricity helps the brain improve plasticity so it can form new neural connections and pathways.[10]
+ Bonus: Crazy cold temperatures improve sleep quality
Do you want to sleep better? Just expose yourself to temperatures of -130°F (-90°C) for a few minutes a day – no biggie. For those without access to Antarctica, a cryochamber is a good option.
Researchers from the Université de Montréal and France’s Université de Poitiers subjected 20 women and men with an average age of 23 to extreme cryostimulation for five consecutive days. Participants spent five minutes each day at -130°F, in basically nothing but a bathing suit, crocodile-like shoes, mittens and a knitted hat (“tuque” in Canadian French).
The contestants then chilled (pun intended) for the rest of the day. After the five days, their sleep improved: their slow-wave sleep (the most restorative kind) increased by more than seven minutes on average, and some participants — mostly women — also benefited from reduced anxiety.[11]
