• Question: what will you be able to do in 5/10 years that you can't do now?

    Asked by hucknall to Sonia, Nick, Lizzie, Andrew on 19 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      I think in 5/10 time we will be able to replace bones when they are damaged. This won’t be required in many cases, as bones normally heal themselves, but for certain conditions such as osteoarthritis and osteoporosis this doesn’t always happen.

      If you have a very severe injury, like we see in the blast injury research that I’m involved with bone often doesn’t heal either. So being able to replace it would be a fantastic development. I think muscles and ligaments will take a little longer, but may be in the next 10/15 years.

      Small parts of bone, muscle and ligaments can already be replaced, but not entire joints for example.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      I think we will be able to do a lot more. There is a move towards stratified medicine so making treatments more specific to maybe your age or health condition in order to treat people better and reduce side effects. I think cell based therapies will become more popular as we learn more about them and maybe even using more nanotechnology in healthcare too. Lots of exciting things to come I’m sure!

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