The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic brought out the best in the world’s scientists. The development of highly effective vaccines in a period of 320 days (measured from the first publication of the COVID-19 genome to the first mass public inoculations) was a record feat that will surely be recognised with several Nobel prizes.
The techniques of applying mRNA technologies to create these vaccines are now being duplicated to repair hearts after a heart attack, banish malaria, and conquer many other scourges of humankind that have blighted populations throughout human evolution.
The cost of the COVID-19 pandemic has been terrible, but the benefits that are emerging from this 'silver lining' will last for many decades. These benefits will, in time, be recognised as the legacy of the global pandemic which started in 2020.
While the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital medicine, work in the other transformative areas of medical research that I identified in my 2019 report has continued unabated. Research into DNA-based medicine, gene-therapy, gene editing, stem-cell medicine, robotics and nano-scale medicine remain likely to yield further positive results in the next couple of decades.
