Health care in the year 2050 and beyond

Abstract

Dramatic advances in clinical information gathering, information processing, and therapies are foreseeable by 2050. Trends include point-of-care measurement of vast numbers of biomarkers, analysis by artificial intelligence, and intervention by regenerative medicine. The final frontier of medicine will be control of disease, including deleterious changes of aging, at the molecular level. The eventual outcome will be life span and health span of indefinite length. Risk aversion, and the associated political, regulatory, and economic milieu will slow medical progress compared to other technological fields.