A world without diseases?

A world without diseases - is that even possible?

It is a risky human experiment. The British physician knows that Edward Jenner, And yet he does not hesitate when he is at 14. May 1796 puncture the smallpox whelk of a milkmaid suffering from cowpox. He transmits the infected fluid to the scratched arm of his gardener's eight-year-old son. Jenner is serving a mission. He wants the dangerous virus infection smallpox 400.000 people die every year in Europe alone every year. A short time later, the child falls pre-programmed to the relatively harmless cowpox. Healthy again, the doctor re-infects it, this time with human pox. If his plan goes up, then the body of the boy after defeating infection has built up a defense against the chickenpox virus. And indeed, he is spared.

Vaccination, derived from the Latin word for cow Vacca, the British physician calls his vaccine. He is laughed, researching, not even stopping in front of his own eleven-month-old son. And then, two years later, his vaccine is recognized. Across Europe, it will be carried out until the middle of the 1970, bringing eradication of smallpox, as the WHO 1980 confirms.

World without diseases through AI medicine?
IT companies will mix medicine in the future and could contribute to a world without diseases:

IBM's Watson - IBM puts the supercomputer Watson in the service of health. It compares the results of patient gene analysis in minutes with millions of other patient records, possible treatments, and research reports. This leads on the quickest way to a precise diagnosis and a corresponding therapy proposal. To do this, they work together with the medical company Quest Diagnostics. Doctors or clinics can shop as a cloud service. "This is a broad commercialization of Watson in the field of oncology," said John Kelly, an IBM research executive.

Google - With google fit the search engine giant enters the medical field. With the DNA test company 23andMe, he has already collected a database of 850.000 DNA samples that users have voluntarily submitted. Pharmaceutical companies Roche and Pfizer will use this DNA data for research. But Google wants to develop more, their own medicine namely. Google Labs has partnered with Novartis to develop an insulin-sensing contact lens and has long begun developing nano-medications.

Microsoft - Bill Gates company has the product Healthcare NeXT marketed, a cloud-based artificial intelligence and research project. In ten years, they also want to have solved the "problem cancer". This is to be made possible by the company's "Biological Computation Unit" whose long-term goal is to turn cells into living computers that can be observed and reprogrammed. The behavior of cancer cells is not very complex in itself, said laboratory manager Chris Bishop. Even a commercially available PC has enough computing power to recognize the underlying algorithms.

Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), - Apple gives its users with the Research KitFirst, an app developer platform, the ability to provide their data from health apps directly for medical research. This attracts the big research institutes as developers of such study apps. "ResearchKit gives the community of scientists access to a diverse population around the world and more data collection than ever before," said Apple.

Visionary, idea, vaccine - is that enough for a world without disease?

In order to eradicate a disease, in this case an infectious disease, what is needed above all a visionary, an idea, a vaccine and a vaccinated world population? Sounds too good to be true? It is. Because it lacks the so-called herd immunity. Vaccination, vaccination and inaccurate vaccination schedules in many countries ensure this. Therefore, smallpox is still the only really eradicated infectious disease. It will not change that soon, the world without diseases is a dream of the future.

In Austria alone, more than half of the parents are vaccine skeptics (56%), according to a survey by the Karl-Landsteiner Association for the Promotion of Medical-Scientific Research. So what does it need at this point? Right, again a visionary. His name could be Scott Nuismer. Nusimer is a scientist at the University of Idaho in Moscow and also has a daring plan: to produce a vaccine that spreads itself and severely restricts or eradicates infectious diseases. That this can work, Nuismer has calculated by simulations using the example of polio. Before that, for example, only 11 percent are sufficiently protected among 17- to 53-year-olds in Germany.

New weapons against cancer

The own immune cells
In the US, 2017 has been approved since September with its own genetically modified immune cells. This will not only treat certain forms of leukemia and lymphoma, but also other types of cancer, such as tumors in the breast, ovary, lung or pancreas, researchers hope.

Molecular Biology
The genetic changes that contribute to the development of cancer has been analyzed in detail in recent years molecular biology. As a result, biotech drugs (monoclonal antibodies) and small synthetic molecules have been developed that specifically attack the features and signaling pathways of cancer cells. There are now more than 200 substances in targeted cancer therapy in clinical trials worldwide.

Arsen
Arsenic, known as a murder poison, can save human lives at the right dose, administered at the right time. Arsenic trioxide improves the chance of recovery in one variant of acute myeloid leukemia, promyelocytic leukemia. This was demonstrated by a Phase III study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Epigenetik
Science is working to find the epigenetic markers that play a role in cancer such as blood cancer. In this context, they are testing agents that will reverse these changes. Cancer cells, so their hope, could be transformed back into healthy cells in this way.

Cold plasma
Promising is a plasma version, which has about body temperature and can be relatively easily produced from electrically charged noble gases and even from air. Treating cancer cells with cold plasma, they kill off quickly and naturally, the surrounding healthy, robust body cells can re-grow into the damaged tissue.

The principle of the "biological weapon"

And this is how it works: In the laboratory Nuismer and his team are modeling a virus, in this case polioGenetically engineered to stop it causing disease but to equip the immune system against the pathogen or other virus. This virus is subsequently released in the wild, spreads by itself and even newborns are easily infected with their environment. A doctor's visit to the vaccine? No one needs it anymore. However, what it takes to realize it is a harmless variant of the original pathogen, such as a weakly infectious virus that is genetically modified so that it can not in any case develop back into a disease-causing virus. Incidentally, this is by no means a crazy vision of the future; self-propagating vaccines are already being used in animal experiments. In the case of rabbit plague and Sin-Nombre hantavirus, deer mice are currently experimenting with it. And scientist Nuismer is convinced that in this way soon viruses such as Ebola will be attacked, which are transmitted from the wild animal to humans.

World without diseases: savior genetic engineering?

So we may soon have the infectious diseases under control. But what about genetic hereditary diseases? Even those could not play a role for 2050. And thanks to genetic engineering. In embryos, scientists will deliberately intervene in the genome in order to eliminate the genes responsible for rare diseases.
That will not happen so fast? Is it long ago, in April 2015 in China - although the attempt failed at that time. Gene therapies in people with serious illnesses are already classified as ethically and legally without hesitation, as long as the change is not passed on to the offspring. In order to intervene, only the genetic defect underlying the disease needs to be well known, such as Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington's Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). These diseases will be eliminated in the early embryonic stage in the future.

And another method brings genetic engineering with it: "Crispr / Cas9". This can be used to change the genome of plants, animals and humans. For example, bone marrow transplantation in diseases such as sickle cell anemia will soon be a thing of the past in our future scenario. Instead of transferring donor cells, one simply corrects the defective gene in one's own hematopoietic cells. The University of Massachusetts has already eliminated a gene in muscle cells that produces a type of muscular dystrophy. Switching off instead of cutting and repairing will soon be the motto. Finally, there is also good news for tropical lovers. Even tropical diseases such as malaria soon belong to the past - through the targeted intervention in the genome of mosquitoes.

Criticism of new genetic engineering
Currently Greenpeace is alarmed by the proposal of the Advocate General at the EU Court of Justice. Novel genetic engineering procedures should not be legally treated as genetic engineering. The novel genetic engineering methods such as CRISPR-Cas (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technically intervene in the genome strand. There is currently no reason to believe that the products made using new genetic engineering techniques do not have negative effects on the environment or on health. In genetic engineering modifications using the CRISPR-Cas technique, unintentional changes in the genome were also found in studies. "Once planted, these plants can outcross or continue to breed. The consequences of this risk technology can affect all plants, animals and humans - even those who do not use such technology or reject the GM products, "said Greenpeace spokesman Hewig Schuster.

Or should it be completely different. About with the Traditional Chinese Medicine TCM? Or other alternatives?

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