Good medicine meets artificial intelligence: New cures for cancer, HIV, and machine learning to make traditional diagnostics smarter

Technological and scientific breakthroughs are outlining a future that could look vastly different from today, and help cure many of the problems the world is facing--from cures for dreaded diseases to making diagnostics cheaper and more easily accessible--at a much faster pace than ever before. In the case of malaria, for instance, as compared to the traditional treatment via drugs--increased drug resistance puts a brake on the efficacy of most cures--Indian scientists have successfully indicated the treatment can be shifted to using proteins to prevent the pathogen from infecting RBCs; in 2015, 212 million people were affected by malaria, and around half a million died. And in the case of cancer--expected to rise from 14.1 million new cases in 2012 to 21.7 million by 2030--the treatment could soon move away from the traditional chemo- and radio-therapy to engineered immune-cells therapy; this started 5-6 years ago, but advances now are far more rapid than in the past. While it was originally developed by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, many private firms and public institutions are trying to perfect this. In this cell therapy, called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, doctors harvest a patient's T-cells which, as part of the immune system, fight against infection.