This was a post about one of the handful of forecasts boldly written last year by my colleague Alex Carmichael, which it fell upon me to perform, promote, and continue investigating from our recently released forecast map on Science, Technology and Well-being. I must admit that I am personally less technologically optimistic than many of the forecasts on that map. With this forecast, my own personal experience with immunomodulators is that we are still at the blunt instrument, barely-know-what-we-don’t-know stage of understanding, more than a decade away from precision interventions for anybody, let alone brad accessibility. Luckily the week before there was a major breakthrough in this area: the first success of gene therapy, which promised to be just around the corner back when I was in high school biotech classes. And what this therapy did was effectively re-train patient’s immune systems in a specific, fine-tuned and persistent way. So, maybe this forecast is on a much shorter horizon than I originally gave it credit.
Excerpt from the full post:
Our immune systems are the key to humans’ profound resilience in the face of all the other organisms around and inside of us.
Over the last few decades we’ve made great strides in understanding the workings of various parts of our immune systems, as they function normally and as they get jammed up in strange ways. This forecast posits that over the next decade we’ll be able to put this knowledge to striking use: honing our immunomodulation therapies, mainstreaming the maturing promise of gene therapy, and hacking our immune systems to accelerate our resistance to all kinds of infections.