Biotech
There are five major trends in the healthcare space:

1. Holistic Concept of Health — develop a drug for a disease, taking into consideration a lot of environmental and internal patient factors.
2. Personalised Drugs — develop hyper-efficient drugs for a very specific group of people.
3. Platform/Algorithm to Produce Multiple Drugs — develop a platform or a way to produce drugs for multiple diseases, for example, vaccines.
4. Consumerisation of Health Care — create consumer-friendly products for healthy people, like the Apple Watch that measures your pulse and blood pressure.
5. Artificial Intelligence Everywhere — self-explanatory.

There are also specific technological methods:

1. Pills.
2. Injections.
3. Antibodies — to block something harmful to the organism.
4. Viruses — that can help treat some diseases.
5. Messenger RNAs — synthesize specific RNAs that encode proteins needed to defeat the disease.
6. Gene Editing — literally change genes, for example, to alter mutations.
7. Microbiome — use the bacteria that’s already inside us.

Most of these methods were developed in the last 20 years!

Gene Therapy/Gene Editing

If the disease is caused by a mutation in the DNA, specifically in one gene. Using CRISPR technology we can change the mutated gene and prevent the disease from developing.
Another gene editing technology, CAR-T, works a bit differently. Scientists take T-cells from the patient’s blood and insert into its DNA a code for a new receptor, CAR. Then these cells are injected back into the patient bloodstream. CAR receptor only reacts to cancerous cells, making it possible for the patient’s own immune system, CAR-T cells, to kill the cancer. Unfortunately, it only helps kids with leukaemia, blood cancer, but in the future, this technology can be used to cure other types of cancer.

RNA Therapy

Some Covid vaccines were developed using RNAs, for example, Pfizer or Moderna. The way it works is not that complicated: we figure out the RNA sequence that encodes proteins located on the outside of the virus. Then, we inject this RNA into our cells. They start developing the viral protein, so the immune system recognises it as alien and develops defense mechanisms against it. So, when the real virus is entering the bloodstream our immune system has already developed antibodies that would block viral proteins.

Synthetic Biology

We know how to read the genome and decode it, but until several years ago it was pretty expensive. But around 2007 a new technology was created that made reading genome significantly cheaper so that anyone can know their DNA. The logical next step is to “write”, synthesise, DNA to recreate genes or create completely new organisms (like in Jurassic Park). We can do that by taking DNA out of an existing cell, synthesising a new one, and then putting it back into the cell. Without any magic, the cell is still alive and functions even with completely artificial DNA! With this technology, we can create bacteria that will protect our body. For that, we will have to, quite literally, program them. This is the basis for life therapy, not drugs, not genome editing, most similar to nanobots you see in sci-fi movies.
Synthetic Biology can also be used for pure technology. The entire function of the DNA is to store information, so people have found a way to encode videos, texts, and photos in DNA. It may seem like an unnecessarily complicated version of a hard drive, but the huge benefit DNA storage has over hard drives is how long can the information be preserved. Usually, hard drives need to be replaced every 5-10 years, but in DNA information can be stored for decades if not forever!

Microbiome

There are as many bacteria in the human body as human cells, so surely bacteria must affect our health in many significant ways. That is where the idea of manipulating those bacteria comes from. The idea of microbiome treatment is to record the balance between different bacteria colonies inside a healthy human, and then try to manipulate the proportions of those colonies inside a patient to make them healthy even without drugs.

Multi-omics

If you imagine how many genes, proteins, and RNAs our cells produce, you will end up with a lot of data that can be analysed. The idea of multi-omics is to go through the data of many different cells to identify some diseases early or choose the correct drugs for different people. The next step for this method is to identify the exact placement of specific genes in the cell.

AlfaFold

The embodiment of the idea that AI can be used to create hyper-efficient drugs from scratch, based on analysis of specific viral proteins. This research won the Nobel Prize this year, and rightfully so, since it can speed up drug development and help us find cures for some yet incurable diseases.

Quantum Computing (may solve drug development)

The main difference between regular computing and quantum computing is simple: in regular computing, everything is encoded in ones and zeros, while in quantum computing it is encoded in anything between 0 and 1, including 0 and 1. Because of that if you can model something into a quantum computer, it can physically balance everything, without calculations, and you can read the final state to get the answer you wanted.

The next step in biotechnology is the development of brain implants that can compensate for some health conditions.

However impossible every one of these methods sounds, you can find the next startup that would save lives.