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The Heart of the Matter

The Next Disruptive Technologies: New Ways to Treat Old Diseases. This lecture offers a survey of the brilliant new breakthroughs in treatments for heart defects and their implications for medical practice more generally. Advances in prenatal diagnosis, fetal intervention and methods of imaging and functional assessment will be presented. The possibilities of gene therapy, regenerative medicine and stem-cell based tissue construction will be described, as well as the opportunities for monitoring patients directly by remote technology. This might minimize the need for direct doctor:patient contact, further reducing cost, but it does present the problem of ever-increasing volumes of data to manage. What affects are these changes having today, and how might they affect the future of medical services in this country and beyond?

Martin Elliott is Gresham Professor of Physic and Co-Medical Director at The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London (GOSH). He led the cardiorespiratory and thoracic transplant teams at GOSH for many years, and established, and is Director of the National Service for Severe Tracheal Disease in Children, the largest such service in the world. (from gresham.ac.uk)

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