Just What the Doctor Ordered

Medical breakthroughs of 2024 and ones to look forward to

- Damien Martin

Science never stops, and so medical breakthroughs keep coming. Researchers learn a little more about diseases and possible solutions every year, sometimes making incremental progress and sometimes cracking the case and finding a lasting cure. It’s hard work that can be painstaking but ultimately greatly rewarding. It’s something to celebrate, so let’s take a look at some of 2024’s biggest medical breakthroughs and some that could be on the horizon for 2025 and beyond.

Liquid Biopsies

The main way to diagnose cancer is through a biopsy. Doctors remove tissue from a patient’s body and then put the tissue through a series of tests to detect cancer. It’s obviously inconvenient and can be quite painful. With the development of liquid biopsies, however, pathology labs can test a blood sample for tumor DNA.

"Liquid biopsy can be a noninvasive way of assessing how well a patient is responding to treatment, and even guiding in real-time treatment de-escalation. It’s useful in people who already have a cancer diagnosis because we know the DNA mutations present in their tumor from the original biopsy, and we know what we’re detecting in the liquid biopsy is actual tumor DNA." - Ari Rosenberg, MD UChicago Medicine Oncologist

Reversing Lupus

Like other autoimmune diseases, lupus causes the immune system to attack healthy cells instead of foreign pathogens. After extensive study, researchers have found a molecular abnormality in lupus patients that might be the cause and could be reversible.

By blocking a protein called interferon which is the main cause of the imbalance, doctors can stop it.