Exploring the Future Frontiers of Human Health, with Francois Nader | Big Think.

I think we have tremendous, tremendous growth, tremendous potential in exploring the frontier of human beings. We are just at the very, very beginning of a very exciting adventure.

And think of diseases as common cold, right? There is nothing terribly unusual about common cold, right? Yet we don’t have a cure for common cold yet, okay? Which is kind of ironic, right? Which means that innovation could be very small for small things like common cold or big things like Alzheimer’s and diabetes. We have multiple products for the diabetes today. We don’t have a cure for diabetes yet.

Actually, if you add Alzheimer’s and diabetes, it could bankrupt our healthcare system. Yet we don’t have a cure for diabetes and we don’t know how to deal with Alzheimer’s yet.

So if I look at the future, a couple of things will happen. One, we have phenomenal tools that will enable us to diagnose and to be more specific in better understanding the mechanism of virtually any disease. And the second aspect would be based on that we can start now, chart the road to better understanding the brain, which will be a huge advancement.

We don’t know much about the brain. We know a few things here and there. But the brain is a huge unknown scientifically still. We don’t have a lot of tools yet to better understand how we think, the memory, and everything related to our behavior. So the brain will be probably the next frontier.

But we should not forget that we have still about 6,000 rare diseases that do not have a treatment, so we have a lot of work to do. And we cannot do it alone. I mean, money and investment is one thing, but we need to continue working on the framework of the regulatory agencies and how we can partner with the regulators to have a clearer path forward to having the new drugs approved.

The biggest challenge we face is science is moving so fast that the regulators have to catch up. They have to catch up to understand and catch up even more to regulate us, which is a very daunting challenge. And I really believe that the regulators are doing the right things in most of the cases.

But at the same time, I can only see the challenges that they have to better understand how the science is progressing. And you hear every day about the genomes and our understanding of the genomes. I mean, this is absolutely flabbergasting the progress we’ve made over the last 15 years in better understanding the inner mechanics of how we work. And from there will come new medications, will come new cures, new treatments.