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Another exciting advancement is the approval of checkpoint inhibitor drugs such as nivolumab, which allow your immune system to fight your own cancer. "These drugs are under rapid
development, are becoming increasingly effective and can reverse the progress of the disease dramatically," Edelman says. In the next five to 10 years, we will see breakthroughs for
personalized medicine in all of lung disease. "We now understand that asthma is not one thing but a collection of things. We’ve identified telltale cells in your blood and sputum that
indicate whether your asthma will respond to one drug or another," Edelman says. "So we have a new class of monoclonal antibody drugs that allows us to treat the 5 to 10 percent of
people with persistent, hard-to-control asthma. We expect this sort of personalized medicine to extend to most other lung diseases." _—Selene Yeager_ TAKE IT TO HEART The discovery of
PCSK9 inhibitors — a new class of injectable drugs that switch off one of the genes responsible for elevated cholesterol — was a blockbuster in the heart field, according to Steven Houser,
research scientist and immediate past president of the American Heart Association. "For folks who have mutations in this pathway, this development is a godsend. The treatments are
currently quite expensive, so use by the general public could be limited. But every company I know is working on drugs for that pathway. They’ll be here in the next five years, and this will
have a big impact." Regeneration is the holy grail of researchers who study cardiac injury and repair, Houser says. "Researchers are testing four or five different flavors of stem
cells in preclinical models to see if they reduce the damage of a heart attack. If any of them do, people will fare way better following an incident. Scientists across the world are
investigating stem cells to regenerate heart tissue. I’m pretty confident that in the next 10 years, we’ll have some regenerative therapies." _—Selene Yeager_ Another breakthrough for
heart care could impact the hundreds of thousands of Americans who receive pacemakers for heart irregularities each year. Last year a new device called the Micra Transcatheter Pacing System
was approved by the FDA. It reduces infection risks, is 93 percent smaller than a conventional pacemaker, is implanted into the heart muscle through a catheter and has no wires. _—Sari
Harrar_ SELF-DONATE STEM CELLS Bone marrow transplants could become easier to perform if doctors use a patient’s own blood stem cells. “Our goal is to make everyone’s cells amenable to
self-donation,” says George Daley, a stem cell biologist and dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has grown the world’s first man-made human blood stem cells in his
lab; these have the potential to grow into all kinds of blood cells. _—Virginia Sole-Smith_ OVERCOME ALLERGIES AND IMMUNODEFICIENCY Biologics could be the way of the future for treating
allergies. "Typically, we treat the symptoms of allergic diseases by targeting the elevated chemicals that cause them, like using antihistamines to lower histamine levels,"
Olajumoke O. Fadugba, M.D., director of the Allergy and Immunology Fellowship Training Program at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, tells AARP. "But now we can also use biologics —
antibodies, such as Xolair, that block the molecules that cause the response. These are dramatically improving the lives of people with hard-to-treat allergic asthma, eczema and other
allergic diseases." In another five to 10 years, we could see breakthroughs in gene therapy for immunodeficiency diseases. "Currently we run a risk of curing one disease — the
immunodeficiency — and inadvertently causing another — cancer. That technology will be better perfected in the years to come," Fadugba says. _—Selene Yeager_ The Quell device is a strap
placed around the calf that uses electrical stimulation to treat pain. Photographs by Craig Cutler