Seminar Report: Science & Health - advancing prevention, diagnosis and treatment

New technological developments derived from interdisciplinary research in the physical, molecular and biological sciences are revolutionising healthcare. Remarkable physical techniques have been developed which allow clinics to imagine inside the body non-invasively, as well as providing new therapeutic methodologies that minimise surgical intervention. Advances in materials science, particularly at the nano-level, are now being applied to living systems with the ultimate aim of engineering new body parts and implants, designing advanced biosensors and diagnostic chip technology, and improving drug delivery. The mapping of the human genome has opened up a whole new field whereby drug-based therapies can potentially be tailored to a patient's genetic make-up. Many of these novel therapeutic approaches present significant socio-economic challenges in terms of how we implement them, their cost to the health system, how we use them as patients, and how they affect the choices we make about our quality of life.

The Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Biology held a seminar at the Royal Society in March 2006 to explore some of the emerging medical technologies and the issues they raise.