Study Describes Five Cutting-Edge Advances in Biomedical Engineering and Their Applications in Medicine

One of the participants in the workshop was Paolo Bonato, PhD, director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabilitation, and associate professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.

“This manuscript is a unique contribution by 50 key players in the field of biomedical engineering highlighting areas of future technical developments that are expected to enable advanced precision medicine interventions,” said Bonato. “The future of medicine is expected to heavily rely on advances in biology and technology and we can achieve this goal by collecting an unprecedented amount of high-quality data that will inform digital twin models, and hence, develop patient-specific therapy plans or even predict and prevent the development of diseases.”

"This paper represents a major milestone in the advancement of biomedical engineering, which could only have been achieved through close collaboration rather than the work of many siloed individuals,” added consortium member Dr. Metin Akay, founding chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Houston and Ambassador of IEEE EMBS. “We have a shared commitment to advancing patient-centric technologies, and healthcare efficacy and accessibility — which extends beyond academic institutions — and elevating healthcare quality, reducing costs and improving lives worldwide.”

By focusing on these five medical challenges facing biomedical engineering, the consortium has laid out a roadmap for future research and funding:

1. Bridging precision engineering and precision medicine for personalized physiology avatars
   In an increasingly digital age, we have technologies that gather immense amounts of data on patients, which clinicians can add to or pull from. Making use of this data to develop accurate models of physiology, called “avatars” — which take into account multimodal measurements and comorbidities, concomitant medications, potential risks and costs — can bridge individual patient data to hyper-personalized care, diagnosis, risk prediction, and treatment. Advanced technologies, such as wearable sensors and digital twins, can provide the basis of a solution to this challenge.

2. The pursuit of on-demand tissue and organ engineering for human health
   Tissue engineering is entering a pivotal period in which developing tissues and organs on demand, either as permanent or temporary implants, is becoming a reality. To shepherd the growth of this modality, key advancements in stem cell engineering and manufacturing — along with ancillary technologies such as gene editing — are required. Other forms of stem cell tools, such as organ-on-a-chip technology, can soon be built using a patient’s own cells and can make personalized predictions and serve as “avatars.”

3. Revolutionizing neuroscience using artificial intelligence (AI) to engineer advanced brain-interface systems
   Using AI, we have the opportunity to analyze the various states of the brain through everyday situations and real-world functioning to noninvasively pinpoint pathological brain function. Creating technology that does this is a monumental task, but one that is increasingly possible. Brain prosthetics, which supplement, replace or augment functions, can relieve the disease burden caused neurological conditions. Additionally, AI modeling of brain anatomy, physiology, and behavior, along with the synthesis of neural organoids, can unravel the complexities of the brain and bring us closer to understanding and treating these diseases.

4. Engineering the immune system for health and wellness
   With a heightened understanding of the fundamental science governing the immune system, we can strategically make use of the immune system to redesign human cells as therapeutic and medically invaluable technologies. The application of immunotherapy in cancer treatment provides evidence of the integration of engineering principles with innovations in vaccines, genome, epigenome and protein engineering, along with advancements in nanomedicine technology, functional genomics and synthetic transcriptional control.

5. Designing and engineering genomes for organism repurposing and genomic perturbations
   Despite the rapid advances in genomics in the past few decades, there are obstacles remaining in our ability to engineer genomic DNA. Understanding the design principles of the human genome and its activity can help us create solutions to many different diseases that involve engineering new functionality into human cells, effectively leveraging the epigenome and transcriptome, and building new cell-based therapeutics. Beyond that, there are still major hurdles in gene delivery methods for in vivo gene engineering, in which we see biomedical engineering being a component to the solution to this problem.

“These grand challenges offer unique opportunities that can transform the practice of engineering and medicine,” remarked Dr. Shankar Subramaniam, lead author of the taskforce, distinguished professor, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego and past President of IEEE EMBS. “Innovations in the form of multi-scale sensors and devices, creation of humanoid avatars and the development of exceptionally realistic predictive models driven by AI can radically change our lifestyles and response to pathologies. Institutions can revolutionize education in biomedical and engineering, training the greatest minds to engage in the most important problem of all times — human health.”

This position paper was published in IEEE OJEMB, and can be accessed here.

*This press release was modified from an original posted by IEEE EMBS, available here.