Aaron Morris

Ow!

As anyone who's stubbed a toe in the dark or spent an hour searching for their key's nose, we're often limited by what we can or cannot see.

In fact, even our own bodies can be black boxes.

Today, I want to take you through a vision of healthcare that scientists and engineers, myself included, are building.

We are creating a diagnostic lab inside your body that can provide a continuous analysis of your health so that we can better see what's happening in patients.

Currently, if someone is sick, we may diagnose them by using a biopsy to bring disease tissue outside the body where we can see it.

We do this if we suspect, for instance, that a growth might be cancerous.

Unfortunately, this approach can't work all the time because of two major problems.

First, some tissues, like brains or spinal cords, can't be routinely biopsied.

And second, doctors often don't know which tissue is causing the problem, so they don't know what to biopsy.

So far, we've dealt with these issues using external medical tests, like MRIs or blood tests.

These provide a broad overview of the health of a patient, but they can't see the molecular and cellular changes that occur within tissues, and they certainly can't provide enough information to proactively treat patients before symptoms develop.

This is unfortunate because it's these invisible changes that ultimately cause disease.

Our inability to measure these changes results in a disparity between what we can see on a test and what we know is happening in patients.

Let's take multiple sclerosis as an example.

In MS, which is an autoimmune disease, the immune system attacks two specific tissues, the brain and the spinal cord, resulting in damage, and in some cases, paralysis.

Now, we obviously can't catch MS by routinely biopsying people's brains, where there would be abundant and active disease-inducing cells.

And we can't catch it using a blood test because the MS-inducing cells are so rare and inactive in the blood that we simply can't see them.

Even brain imaging technologies like MRI can't provide the information we need to be proactive about MS.

So we need to rethink how we see.