Medicine and health of 21st Century: Not just a high biotech-driven solution

Abstract

Many biotechnological innovations have shaped the contemporary healthcare system (CHS) with significant progress to treat or cure several acute conditions and diseases of known causes (particularly infectious, trauma). Some have been successful while others have created additional health care challenges. For example, a reliance on drugs has not been a panacea to meet the challenges related to multifactorial noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)-the main health burden of the 21st century. In contrast, the advent of omics-based and big data technologies has raised global hope to predict, treat, and/or cure NCDs, effectively fight even the current COVID-19 pandemic, and improve overall healthcare outcomes. Although this digital revolution has introduced extensive changes on all aspects of contemporary society, economy, firms, job market, and healthcare management, it is facing and will face several intrinsic and extrinsic challenges, impacting precision medicine implementation, costs, possible outcomes, and managing expectations. With all of biotechnology's exciting promises, biological systems' complexity, unfortunately, continues to be underestimated since it cannot readily be compartmentalized as an independent and segregated set of problems, and therefore is, in a number of situations, not readily mimicable by the current algorithm-building proficiency tools. Although the potential of biotechnology is motivating, we should not lose sight of approaches that may not seem as glamorous but can have large impacts on the healthcare of many and across disparate population groups. A balanced approach of "omics and big data" solution in CHS along with a large scale, simpler, and suitable strategies should be defined with expectations properly managed.

Fig. 1. Some notable public measures outside the medical care realm that have significantly improved population health.

These measures included quarantine during Black Death epidemic, hygiene and social distancing in the Crimean war, the building of mountain sanatoria to cure TB^–, the implementation of a sewage system to overcome London’s Great stink^,, and the introduction of water filtration and chlorination systems/technologies to clean potable water in the USA.

Fig. 2. Main social measures that mitigated COVID-19 spread and helped in disease prevention and control (flatten the contagion curve) before vaccine development.

(1: quarantine/lockdown/curfew; 2: healthy and balanced diet; 3: adequate sleeping; 4: frequent hand washing; 5: cleaning and disinfection of both surfaces and the air; 6: regular domestic exercise; 7: facemask wearing; and 8: social distancing).