Blog 1: Grand Challenges of Engineering and Medicine: Precision Medicine -- Part 1

Welcome to the Biopotential newsletter! While we take some time to get some more episodes to everyone, I figured it was a good idea to talk about interesting research articles that I find in IEEE’s Journal of Engineering and Medicine. Along with that, I’ll include some internship opportunities for undergrads because I know we’re all in need of that 😃.

 In any case, let’s begin with our first topic: The challenges at the interface of Engineering and Medicine. Since Biopotential is all about how non-biomedical engineers can break into the medical technology field, I figured talking about some of the biggest challenges in medicine and engineering could spur some inspiration and help students explore some areas they may be curious about without having to read a bunch of confusingly-worded research articles. With that in mind, let’s begin our first blog!

The Grand Challenges at the Interface of Engineering and Medicine were created by experts in these two fields in order to identify the challenges, competencies, and technologies needed to push forward the field of medicine. The first grand challenge, which we will begin covering in today’s blog post is Precision Medicine and the use of human avatars. Each grand challenge is composed of 5 smaller, yet still ambitious, sub-challenges. Let’s begin with the first sub-challenge: creating accurate models of physiology.

While medicine has come up with many standardized practices in order to treat patients, the truth of the matter is that all patients are different due to a slew of factors —genetics, physiology, lifestyle, metabolism, and more. In order to push medicine forward, one of the challenges is to be able to account for the unique features of each patient such that their medical care is tailored toward them. The first step in that process is being able to create an accurate model of an individual’s physiology. 

One of the prerequisites to this goal is to obtain new high throughput assays that can probe an individual's biological status on multiple levels. High throughput assays are an experimentation method, in which one can measure large samples in one experiment. In other words, this prerequisite outlines that we need more high-efficiency methods to obtain large amounts of data on a patient’s function at the molecular, cellular, and organ levels. 

This data is incredibly important as we need it in order to fuel data driven, mechanistic, and deep learning models of human physiology. You may wonder what the importance of something like this is. Well, think about it like this: if we have a heavily validated, and accurate model of a patient’s biology, we can use it to understand what risks a patient may be subject to. For example, if we had a model of a patient's status that includes factors such as hormones, cholesterol levels, metabolism, and other physiological parameters, then it would be easier to diagnose and prognose an ailment like heart disease. Let’s use House M.D. to further elaborate on its usefulness. If Dr. House had a data driven model of each of his patients, then the show would be quite boring. He could give more accurate diagnoses immediately, since he has much more information on the patients’ biology. Along with that, he can give them proper care instead of experimenting on them! Overall, accurate models of a patient’s biology can give doctors important information that can improve diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.

To quickly summarize this sub-challenge: we need models of patient biological function. In order to obtain these models, we need ways to gain large amounts of data on a patient’s individual biology. In order to do this, we need new high throughput assays that can obtain this data quickly and efficiently. The main STEM competencies that are required for this, aside from biology and chemistry, are proficiency in deep-learning models, data science, computer science, bioinformatics, engineering (specifically for systems to aid assays), and statistics. In other words, synergy between many disciplines is required in order to push this field forward —not just biology!

Thanks for reading our first blog! Make sure to look out for our next one where we cover the next two sub-challenges of precision medicine.

Jobs:

Siemens Healthineers: https://careers.siemens-healthineers.com/global/en/students

HuBMap Consortium: https://hubmapconsortium.org/internship-program/ Illumina Summer Internship: https://www.illumina.com/company/careers/interns.html

Bristol Myers Squibb Internships: https://careers.bms.com/internships-co-ops/