MIT Technology Review ha publicado las 10 Tecnologías Innovadoras para este año 2024.

 MIT Technology Review ha publicado las 10 Tecnologías Innovadoras para este año 2024.

La lista de tecnologías innovadoras se publica anualmente y destaca los avances tecnológicos que, según los editores y reporteros de MIT Technology Review, tendrán el mayor impacto en el mundo en los próximos años.

Aquí van las 10 tecnologías. Algunas son conocidas (incluso repetidas hasta la saciedad), otras son realmente sorprendentes, al menos para mi:

✔ IA para todo: Herramientas de IA generativa como ChatGPT han alcanzado un grado de adopción masiva en tiempo récord y cambiado el rumbo de todo un sector.

✔ Células solares supereficientes: Las células solares que combinan el silicio tradicional con perovskitas de última generación podrían elevar la eficiencia de los paneles solares a nuevas cotas.

✔ Apple Vision Pro: La tecnología micro-OLED lleva desarrollándose más de una década, pero el Vision Pro será la demostración más destacada de sus capacidades hasta la fecha.

✔ Medicamentos para adelgazar: Los fármacos para adelgazar son muy populares y eficaces, pero se desconocen sus efectos a largo plazo sobre la salud.

✔ Sistemas geotérmicos mejorados: Esta avanzada tecnología de perforación podría liberar el potencial de la energía geotérmica en muchos lugares.

✔ Chiplets: Los fabricantes apuestan a que chips más pequeños y especializados pueden prolongar la vida de la Ley de Moore.

✔ El primer tratamiento de edición genética: La anemia falciforme es la primera enfermedad vencida por CRISPR a medida que la tecnología llega al mercado.

✔ Ordenadores a exaescala: Los ordenadores capaces de realizar quintillones de operaciones por segundo están ampliando los límites de lo que los científicos pueden simular.

✔ Bombas de calor: Las bombas de calor son una tecnología consolidada. Ahora empiezan a hacer verdaderos progresos en la descarbonización de los hogares, edificios e incluso la industria manufacturera.

✔ Asesinos de X (antes llamado Twitter). Están apareciendo alternativas como Bluesky o Threads.

Tenéis el enlace al informe completo aquí: https://lnkd.in/dts2-7vy

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/08/1085094/10-breakthrough-technologies-2024/#super-efficient-solar-cells

Weight-loss drugs

The global rise in obesity has been called an epidemic by the World Health Organization. Medications like Mounjaro and Wegovy are now among the most powerful tools that patients and physicians have to treat it. Evidence suggests they can even protect against heart attacks and strokes.

The first gene-editing treatment

New treatments based on CRISPR have been in the works for years. In the final weeks of 2023, one from Vertex became the first to earn regulatory approval in both the UK and the US for its ability to cure sickle-cell disease, a life-threatening condition. It won’t be the last.

WHO

CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Precision BioSciences, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

WHEN

Now

The first gene-editing cure has arrived. Grateful patients are calling it “life changing.”

It was only 11 years ago that scientists first developed the potent DNA-snipping technology called CRISPR. Now they’ve brought CRISPR out of the lab and into real medicine with a treatment that cures the symptoms of sickle-cell disease.

Sickle-cell is caused by inheriting two bad copies of one of the genes that make hemoglobin. Symptoms include bouts of intense pain, and life expectancy with the disease is just 53 years. It affects 1 in 4,000 people in the US, nearly all of them African-American. 

So how did this disease become CRISPR’s first success? A fortuitous fact of biology is part of the answer. Our bodies harbor another way to make hemoglobin that turns off when we’re born. Researchers found that a simple DNA edit to cells from the bone marrow could turn it back on.

 

Many CRISPR treatments are in trials, but in 2022, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, was first to bring one to regulators for approval. That treatment was for sickle-cell. After their bone marrow was edited, nearly all the patients who volunteered in the trial were pain free. 

Good news. But the expected price tag of the gene-editing treatment is $2 to $3 million. And Vertex has no immediate plans to offer it in Africa—where sickle-cell disease is most common, and where it still kills children.

The company says this is because the treatment regimen is so complex. It involves a hospital stay; doctors remove the bone marrow, edit the cells, and then transplant them back. In countries that still struggle to cover basic health needs, the procedure remains too demanding. So simpler, cheaper ways to deliver CRISPR could come 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/08/1085101/crispr-gene-editing-sickle-cell-disease-breakthrough-technologies/