Sanjiv Chopra, MD: What Are the 5 Most Impactful Medical Science Advances for the Future?

In an interview with HCPLive, Sanjiv Chopra, MD, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, highlighted his predictions for the 5 key advances set to impact medical science in the future. Chopra’s predictions were part of his presentation at Pri-Med Midwest 2022.

“You know, Niels Bohr, a Nobel Laureate physicist said 100 years ago, predictions are difficult, especially those about the future,” Chopra said. “I'm going to make those predictions. And the first one is artificial intelligence. I think a better name could be aided intelligence or augmented intelligence.”

Chopra elaborated on this point, describing his view that certain clinicians will find the implementation of artificial intelligence technology useful and others—namely radiologists—may find that it replaces much of what they handle on a regular basis.

“The second one is the microbiome, the gut microbiome…Third is CRISPR and gene editing,” he explained. “The fourth is messenger RNA. And the fifth, believe it or not, is the psychedelic revolution, mushrooms, and ketamine changing the landscape of people with anxiety, PTSD, people in hospitals, afraid of death.”

The discussion shifted to another topic covered in Chopra’s Pri-Med presentation, namely addressing which takeaways Chopra felt were the most important from the recent Nobel Prize-winning idea that a bacterium in the stomach could cause peptic ulcer disease.

“Who could have thought that a bacterium could survive in the harsh gastric acid environment of the stomach, and actually cause peptic ulcer disease, the renal disease…” he said. “You know, we used to have a saying that wants an ulcer, always an ulcer, you could heal the ulcer crater, but the ulcer would come back, the ulcer diathesis would persist. Now when we eradicate H. pylori, people are cured of peptic ulcer disease.”

Chopra further described the discovery’s facets, including the 3 main causes of duodenal ulcer disease as well as the findings about H. pylori bacteria.

View the other Pri-Med Midwest 2022 coverage to find out more about these topics.