The editorial by the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Mathieu Nowak is excerpted from Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche 908. The magazine is available in all the usual points of sale from Thursday 22 September, and also in a digital version.
By dint of seeing the hospital regularly in the headlines due to the deep structural crisis it is going through, we forget how much medicine is constantly innovating. A number of research avenues are reaching maturity. They are deciphered in our sheet of the month.
Medical revolutions are underway
This is the case of mRNA. The speed of development of a vaccine against Covid-19 is, in fact, the culmination of four decades of work. The scope of which we still do not fully measure. Because mRNA also brings new hope for, among other things, the fight against cancer. Let’s not forget that one in six women and one in five men will develop cancer during their lifetime. This disease is already increasingly better treated with a very different approach to radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which consists of attacking cancer cells directly: immunotherapy. Its goal is to help our own immune system fight disease. An approach that has already proven its effectiveness against melanomas. But that is not all. Gene therapy, neurostimulation or stem cell transplants are also gradually reinforcing the therapeutic arsenal of doctors. Of course, the research time unfortunately is not always that of the patient.
But medical revolutions are underway. Stroke victims, for example, already benefit from this with the thrombectomy technique, which not only saves care time, but also doubles the chances of continuing to live independently. Other pathways are still in development. Otherwise Sciences and Future-Research, we also want to be optimistic about the prospects offered by researchers for future generations. So that they can live better and longer in good health.
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