The Covid-19 pandemic has been a challenge for scientists and doctors around the world, but it has also enabled the development of new practices and new tools, such as artificial intelligence.
- The Covid-19 pandemic has had consequences on medicine and its developments.
- It was an opportunity for important collaborations between different disciplines.
- New technologies, including artificial intelligence, have also been used on a large scale.
Covid-19 has been a global upheaval. It has changed the daily lives of millions of people around the world, but above all it has transformed medicine. In the journal Frontiers in Sciencea team of scientists looks back at the lessons learned from the pandemic. According to them, the health crisis will have consequences on the medicine of the future.
What has the pandemic brought to medicine?
This work was led by Professor Michel Goldman, researcher in immunology at the Free University of Brussels and by Professor Philippe Sansonetti, microbiologist at the Institut Pasteur and the Collège de France. “The Covid-19 pandemic will have profound and lasting impacts on risk anticipation, the practice of medicine and health care management”says Professor Goldman, president and founder of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Health Care at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Artificial intelligence: a pillar of the medicine of the future?
For the two researchers, two main elements should be remembered: interdisciplinarity and the use of digital tools, such as artificial intelligence. They recall that at the time of the pandemic, there were important collaborations between different sectors and disciplines. Moreover, “Since there was initially no vaccine to control transmission, we needed non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, planned using large-scale mathematical modeling”they say.Video calls allowed patients to speak to a doctor without risking catching the virus, while insights from big data were used to identify vulnerable patients and target treatments.” They consider that these innovations are essential tools for thinking about the future of care and health in general. They cite the example of telemedicine, which will allow patients to consult more easily, but also connected objects, which offer possibilities for home care for certain conditions.
Personalized or systemic: two aspects of the medicine of the future
Artificial intelligence and digital tools should also contribute to adopting a systemic approach to medicine, to make it more effective. According to Professor Sansonetti, it is about exploiting “large amounts of data of different types, collected from different sources, to generate highly accurate diagnoses, prognoses and treatment options“For example, it could help identify existing, safe drugs that could be quickly repurposed to treat new diseases.
But scientists also believe that personalized medicine could develop further. This involves taking into account genetic factors, personal habits and environmental criteria. “Personalized medicine delivers the right treatment to the right patient at the right time,” summarizes Professor Philippe Sansonetti.
Medicine of the future: challenges ahead
Both scientists remain cautious about the future. They recall that several criteria must be met for the medicine of the future to see the light of day: equal access to new technologies, security guarantees regarding artificial intelligence and sufficient funding to allow interdisciplinary work.
