The future diagnostic lab ... inside your body | Aaron Morris
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What innovative approach is being taken to diagnose diseases?
Hi, it's Bryce Dallas Howard here, guest hosting today on TED Talks Daily. Here's a talk from TED fellow and immunoengineer Aaron Morris. He's innovating on the future of medical testing by diagnosing disease from devices within the body.
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.
What are the limitations of current diagnostic methods?
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. My coworkers at the University of Michigan and I decided to do just that. Instead of taking an outside-in approach to diagnostics, we're taking an inside-out approach. We are creating implantable sites that have similarities to other sites in the body and will improve our vision by giving us real-time access to molecular and cellular information about disease tissues. These insights will enable us to predict the onset of disease and even identify therapies likely to work in an individual patient. So, what does this inside-out approach look like? Step one is to engineer new tissues just under the skin.
These tissues have similarities to other inaccessible sites in the body, like the brain or the lungs.
How can implantable technology improve disease detection?
By implanting a porous plastic disc made of FDA-approved biomaterials, I can harness the body's natural responses to allow cells to migrate into the disc, survive at the site, and form a tissue. Eventually, we're left with an engineered tissue with integrated immune cells, just the cells we need for diagnosis. Although these tissues are complex and chronically inflamed, they're also innocuous, and after a few weeks, nearly imperceptible. Our engineered tissues contain information not present in the blood, and they can help bridge the gap between what we can see on a traditional test and cellular changes we know occur in disease. Step two is to read this signal. Currently, I could take a biopsy of my engineered site and analyze it because I made them accessible just under the skin.
But it would certainly be better if we could incorporate and read a sensor non-invasively. Within the next decade, rapidly converging technologies could enable diagnosis at such an implant by harnessing simple detectors like a blood pressure cuff or smartwatch does now.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What innovative approach is being taken to diagnose diseases?
0:04–1:38
2
What are the limitations of current diagnostic methods?
1:38–3:12
3
How can implantable technology improve disease detection?
3:12–4:59
4
What is the inside-out approach to diagnostics?
4:59–5:25
5
What future advancements can we expect in medical diagnostics?
5:25–6:16
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from TED Talks Daily
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