Page 25 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution

still poor, increasing amounts of data will make precision medicine

possible, enabling the development of highly targeted therapies to improve
treatment outcomes. Already, IBM’s Watson supercomputer system can help
recommend, in just a few minutes, personalized treatments for cancer
patients by comparing the histories of disease and treatment, scans and

genetic data against the (almost) complete universe of up-to-date medical
knowledge. 11

The ability to edit biology can be applied to practically any cell type,
enabling the creation of genetically modified plants or animals, as well as
modifying the cells of adult organisms including humans. This differs from

genetic engineering practiced in the 1980s in that it is much more precise,
efficient and easier to use than previous methods. In fact, the science is
progressing so fast that the limitations are now less technical than they are
legal, regulatory and ethical. The list of potential applications is virtually
endless – ranging from the ability to modify animals so that they can be

raised on a diet that is more economical or better suited to local conditions,
to creating food crops that are capable of withstanding extreme temperatures
or drought.

As research into genetic engineering progresses (for example, the
development of the CRISPR/Cas9 method in gene editing and therapy), the

constraints of effective delivery and specificity will be overcome, leaving
us with one immediate and most challenging question, particularly from an
ethical viewpoint: How will genetic editing revolutionize medical research
and medical treatment? In principle, both plants and animals could
potentially be engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and other forms of

treatment. The day when cows are engineered to produce in its milk a
blood-clotting element, which haemophiliacs lack, is not far off.
Researchers have already started to engineer the genomes of pigs with the

goal of growing organs suitable for human transplantation (a process called
xenotransplantation, which could not be envisaged until now because of the
risk of immune rejection by the human body and of disease transmission
from animals to humans).

In line with the point made earlier about how different technologies fuse and
enrich each other, 3D manufacturing will be combined with gene editing to

produce living tissues for the purpose of tissue repair and regeneration – a
process called bioprinting. This has already been used to generate skin,

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