The votes are in.
Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation Summit wrapped today with its annual list of top ten innovations that will be dominant in 2016. Out of 246 potential candidates, they were voted on and narrowed down to 10.
These are all relatively familiar technologies and areas of healthcare innovation that have made a strong impression already this year – but still need tweaking. They definitely show significant promise to be developed further within the next year.
10. Neurovascular stent retriever: This new solution to ischemic stroke treatment will be a game-changer within the next year as it allows a blood clot to actually be removed in addition to traditional drug therapy. As Dr. Peter Rasmussen with the Neurological Institute stated, “It’s not new, but what it is new are the trials now demonstrating the efficacy.”
9. Frictionless Remote Monitoring: Many people are currently using wearables to monitor wellness, 20% of Americans. Non-invasive methods, like patches worn on the skin to monitor glucose levels, are next for measuring biometrics.
8. First-ever treatment for HSDD: Treatment for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder has been a hot topic this year, being referred to as the “female Viagra.” Although it’s nothing like Viagra, as it is addressing chemical function in the brain with a pill taking daily, it is still a step forward in addressing sexual experience for women. As Dr. Holly Thacker with Women’s Health Institute explained, women can actually drink socially with the pill, so that shouldn’t necessarily be one of the more prominent criticisms of Flibanserin – although, it has thus far.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
7. Naturally controlled artificial limbs: By next year, it is predicted that EEG placed systems that aren’t implanted but actually just placed on the surface of the head will be available to make the reality of limb movement simply a matter of neurosignals coming from the brain. With non-invasive options, cost will go down as well as risks to safety.
6. Cancer screening protein biomarker analysis: This new way of analyzing proteins looks more at the structure of proteins, say with prostate or breast cancer patients, as opposed to just the amount of proteins. Not only that, this kind of analysis would be much faster with real-time results.
5. Cell-Free fetal DNA testing: This is expected to be the next level in prenatal genetic testing that would be non-invasive as well as dramatically reducing the false-negative results that currently pose a problem. As Dr. Jeffrey Chapa from the Women’s Health Institute explained, testing like this will become less expensive as the technology continues to move forward.
4. Water purification systems for prevention of infectious diseases: As Bill Gates demonstrated, drinking water derived from using sewage is actually quite tasty. This technology could not only will provide more sanitary water sources for nearly half of the global population potential, the process of creating it is also a sustainable source of energy – two birds, one stone.
3. Gene editing using CRISPR: We’ve heard quite a bit about this, and it’s a little bit surprising that it’s not in the number one spot, but that’s partially because it’s really not necessarily going to be ready to effectively be put in use within the next year to tackle a wide variety of genetic disorders. But as Jonathan Smith, PhD from the Lerner Research Institute emphasized: “This is sweeping like a forest fire.”
2. Genomic directed clinical trials: A lot of time and energy is wasted with the way clinical trials are currently being run. Looking at metabolic rates will be a source to determine whether or not a medication will be effective for a given patient in the early, most critical phases of treatment. Dr. Charis Eng from the Genomic Medicine Institute shared that Cleveland Clinic is planning to lead a trial that will look focus on autism treatment in the next year and a half.
1. Vaccines to prevent public health epidemics: Clearly this has been a big focus this year and some potential solutions moving forward look like they will actually materialize in 2016. Public health and infectious disease prevention will be a critical sector of innovation, and Dr. Steven Gordon of the Medicine Institute believes similar techniques toward prevention will be increasingly be applied to areas like cancer, the HPV vaccine being an example of that.
