Engineering Grand Challenges – Engineering better medicines

The TED blog points us to the release of Grand Challenges for Engineering released by the National Academy of Engineering. In other words, not something to be taken lightly. Over the next few days, I am going to discuss some of these challenges

We start with the challenge to Engineer better medicines.

The story is not new. We all know (or are in denial) that the traditional approach to drug development, aka the blockbuster model, is not cutting it any more. What we need are new approaches to drug development and new ways to approach and understand diseases, disease prevention and disease treatment.

Where do the grand challenges lie? Well, there is a laundry list of challenges, but many are focused on the same problem; how can we leverage our increasing knowledge of human genetics and systems biology to develop more personalized treatments. The engineering challenges are correctly identified as the need to develop multiplexed assays for assessing a genetic profile and for point-of-care and other diagnostic systems, an area where nanotechnology is going to make a huge difference. Another area where nanotech is likely to play a role, but other technologies as well, is drug delivery. One of the challenges facing drug makers is getting effective drugs to their targeted regions (rather than dispersing them in the blood). Novel drug delivery systems also make some drugs, that would be discarded for solubility or other reasons, viable again.

Synthetic biology is also identified as a grand challenge, and not surprisingly so. The field combines modern biology with bioengineering with multiple applications, including those in regenerative medicine. Personally, while I worry about overzealous legislators overregulating this fledgling field, and of the dangers of overhyping, it is clear to me that synthetic biology is worth pursuing. Not only is it fascinating scientifically, but if we can apply it safely, the possibilities are endless.

The challenge does mix up engineering with aspects that most would consider scientific challenges, e.g. creating new molecules in the lab is not chemical engineering, nor is the search for novel drug candidates to fight infectious disease engineering.

The take home message is simple in a sense. Tomorrow’s healthcare will be driven by a mix of chemistry, biology, informatics and engineering, and none can be successful without the other. We need to work together and try and address these problems. Too often you see big talk, the race to publish papers, but the people willing to take the risks, develop industrial scale facilities, to commercialize innovation and bring it to the masses are few and far between. Hopefully, we will see them soon enough, cause our future health requires some of these challenges to be overcome.

Technorati Tags: Engineering Grand Challenge, Drug Development, Futurist