TWC lesson 6

Brief summary of the lesson

The lesson started off with an introduction to the biomedical and healthcare revolution. BioBusiness is the commercial activity based on an understanding of life sciences and life science processes. Prof then talked about the individual sectors of biobusiness. And that despite beauty and sex trade being taken off the list, the market size of the business was still very huge. It is evident that this market will only continue to grow bigger as more people move up the income ladder, leading to an increase in demand for healthcare. The discussion then moved on to key BioBusiness opportunity areas and that BioInnovation has a huge potential in revolutionizing the BioBusiness landscape. The lesson then moved into global burden of disease. It was interesting to note that as a country develops, infectious diseases decrease while chronic diseases increases. Afterwards,we discussed about how important ICT was in the development of Biomedical science, in which Prof quoted the example of the genetic makeup of Insulin. That scientist nowadays can easily compare and share data through ICT technologies, and that can lead to easier sharing of knowledge which in time leads to greater innovation. It was interesting how ICT technologies can interact with healthcare technologies to form new technologies like telehealthcare. We are in the middle of two revolutions. Healthcare revolutions and biomedical science revolution.  Basically everything we talked about above are subsets of the two. These two are summits opportunities. The last part of the lesson talked about specific areas of innovations like prosthetics, nanomedicine and stemcells. 

Interesting observation and ideas

Firstly, Telemedicine is a field with a large amount of potential. It basically means that patients do not have to physically travel down to the clinic all the time and instead use social media like Skype to facilitate a consultation. If daily consults can take place through skype. It will make a big difference. Especially for old people who have mobility issues, they will not have to waste time travelling nor waste time queuing up for a consultation. They could just carry on with their lives at home and wait for a call from the doctor/nurse when they are ready. This could lead to massive savings on healthcare as unnecessary trips to the clinics are reduced. There’ll be less crowd at the hospitals and patients who really need the healthcare can get it in a shorter time frame. The benefits are numerous, and this could potentially revolutionize the way we consume healthcare.There were many areas which I found very interesting in this lesson as I took biology in JC and this lesson helped apply many areas of what I learnt into practical usage.

Another issue is on Obesity. Obesity has recently taken the world by storm, and is one major problem in the developed worlds these days. In my opinion, prevention is always better than cure. But are governments around the world doing enough in preventing obesity? When tobacco was proven to be carcinogenic, governments around the world took steps to curb down on the advertisements and did extensive campaigns to educate the public on the risk involved with smoking. Cigarettes were taken out of the television screen, any commercials of tobacco were banned, and taxes were heavily implemented on tobacco. My question is why these measures are not implemented in today’s society in regards to obesity. Obesity is a disease, it stems from a bad habit that is hard to kick and that it has heavy health risk associated with it. Shouldn’t the government be curbing fast food commercials, taxing food with bad nutritional content to reduce the demand for these unhealthy, obesity inducing food products? 

Finally, I would like to talk about stem cells and its potential in BioBusiness. My individual report would be on therapeutic cloning, which is simply creating stem cells in the lab and using those stem cells to treat disease. The potential of this industry is massive, and it will definitely be a huge part of BioBusiness one day. However, right now there are a lot of ethical and social concerns surrounding this science. Since therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning(which is the cloning of a whole human being) are very similar in the processes, there are many concerns that if therapeutic cloning was allowed to develop unrestricted, reproductive cloning will inevitably be mastered in the process. Due to these social and ethical issues there are no public funding for these research and a lot of restrictions are placed on their resources, leading to the slow growth and innovation in the field of therapeutic cloning. I feel that it’s a pity that such a technology with such potential is being held back by ethics and morality. 

Key takeaways

As prof said over and over again, we are living in exciting times! The BioBusiness is evolving rapidly to cope with the huge increase in demand from healthcare and we will be seeing some huge changes in the BioBusiness industry. Innovations like using robots to replace nurses and the evolution of Nutraceutical science are just some of the examples of how the future of healthcare might very possibly look like. In such fluctuating times we must learn to adapt and predict such changes in order to acheive a rising star position. 

Issues for further discussion

I thought the idea of nutraceutical science was a really interesting topic. Imagine eating an apple with properties that can lower blood pressure! Would be interesting if we could have a detailed discussion regarding the possible implications of this science.

Personal rating

I would give this lesson a 9/10 as the area of BioBusiness was particularly interesting to me. The ideas and concepts taught in this lesson really broadens my perspective and increases my general knowledge. Really looking forward to part 2 of BioBusiness next lesson!