The National Academy of Engineering announced the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The committee also praised biomedical and biological engineering as the research field to fulfill the promise of personalized medicine. Included among these 14 challenges were Reverse-Engineering the Brain, Engineer better Medicines and Advance Health Informatics. An important way of exploiting such information would be through the development of methods that allow doctors to forecast the benefits and side effects of potential treatments or cures. "Reverse-Engineering" the Brain, is an emerging discipline that helps us to understand how the brain works and treats several diseases. It furthermore helps us to develop computerized artificial intelligence. Advanced computer intelligence, in turn, should enable automated diagnosis and prescriptions for treatment. Computerized catalogs of health information will enhance the medical system's ability to track the spread of disease and analyze the comparative effectiveness of different approaches to prevention and therapy. Finally, engineering new medicines will help us fight the growing danger of attacks from novel disease-causing agents. For instance, certain deadly bacteria have repeatedly evolved new properties, conferring resistance against even the most powerful antibiotics. New viruses arise with the power to kill and spread more rapidly than disease-prevention systems are designed to counteract.
Intellectual Merits: The main objective of the Advanced Summer Institute on Global Healthcare-- Challenges and Opportunities is to highlight and discuss these emerging grand challenges, mainly focused on the latest advances in the areas of science, engineering, technology and medicine. The institute provides a unique environment to discuss the emerging research areas, challenges and opportunities which lead to very fruitful discussions.
Broader Impacts: It exposes the attendees with biology and medicine backgrounds to the latest developments in these emerging enabling technologies. It is also helpful to those with engineering and science background who are interested in doing research in bionanoscience and nanomedicine, neuroscience and engineering since the advanced institute provides exceptional insights into the fundamental challenges in biology and medicine.
