Imagine a future where your doctor gives you a customized infusion with a top-up every 5 to 10 years that “dials down” your genetic risk factors for all kinds of diseases WITHOUT making permanent changes to your DNA. Welcome to the world of epigenetic editing …

What does the future of medical devices look like when microchips and nervous systems speak the same language? I learned about the EXPONENTIAL opportunities from the inspiring Dr Elisa Donati, a senior scientist working at the intersection of neuroscience, technology and medicine …

Affordable age-reversal. Xenotransplants to eliminate organ shortages. Rewriting health economics. Virus resistant livestock and crops. What are the imminent genomics pathways to a better future? I asked George Church, the greatest genomic pioneer in the world …

GEORGE CHURCH: two things I'd like to see happen, is affordable healthcare to get us up out of poverty, and then something that will solve the 90% of disease that will get us past our normal retirement age. If we extend life by 30 years, and we extend retirement by 30 years, then …

The future of medicine is one where all cancers are either 100% curable or turned into manageable diseases. You’ve heard me tell the story in my keynotes for many years. Now it’s time for you to hear from one of the heroes of that story, Bruce Levine …

BRUCE LEVINE: The dream is that we will have in vivo therapies of many types. We're going to have them soon with sickle cell disease and perhaps some other hemoglobinopathies … I think we'll see in vivo CAR T-cells, whether that's an autoimmune disease or blood cancers … 

The story of cancer medicine is multi-threaded. It’s a story of early detection, of surgical removal, of radio- and chemo-therapies, of understanding lifestyle factors, of sequencing and pinpointing genetic factors, and lately of immunotherapies, with each new weapon overlapping and complementing the others. Dr Ben Stanger and his team at the UPenn Perelman School of Medicine are working on 3 new entire armories …

BEN STANGER: The biggest impact I think in cancer will come not from treating cancer, but from preventing it from happening in the first place. So there is an emerging concept out there now called cancer interception. It's subtly different from prevention …

We all know someone who has died of a heart attack. That’s because heart disease is the number one killer on our planet today. At a cutting-edge facility at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr Kiran Musunuru is developing something truly extraordinary, a ‘one and done’ gene therapy to reduce heart disease across ALL of humanity …

KIRAN MUSUNURU: What if we could deploy those good mutations across the entire population? Basically what you're doing is you're shifting the entire bell curve [for heart disease]. There's still going to be people who are still at higher risk than the general average population, but they're much better off …

Designer babies, agricultural mishaps, extinction via gene-drive – all possible now that CRISPR has placed into our hands the awesome power to “edit life” in all its forms. So, how to keep the good while preventing the bad? How to safeguard our future? Is that even possible? I asked Jennifer Kuzma, global expert on biotech responsibility, to shed light on one of the most important governance challenges of our time …

JENNIFER KUZMA: We always have to be careful if we're adding an organism with a gene drive in the environment, in open ecosystems, that we can actually make sure that we have an ability to control it or recall it, because there have been a number of biological control introductions that have gone awry …

Rejuvenation and regeneration, hope versus hyperbole, healthspans and lifespans. There is a frenzied focus on the potential for new drugs to extend human lifespans right now. But it’s a complex field, with more than a few charlatans and opportunists promising drugs that’ll buy you 150 years and more! I asked one of the world’s leading geroscientists to help me cut through to the reality …

Jan Vijg: What you ultimately want to do of course is to improve health, and you don't want people to be sickly when they are in their early 70s but you want them to stay healthy until they're in their 90s or longer … then at least they had a good, healthy, long life …

Bruce McCabe: Bruce McCabe: Dr. Demirkol, thank you so much for making time to talk to us. I wanted to talk to you about the future of gene therapies and eye diseases today because of what you're doing here ... I'd like to start very broad, can you tell us what's the dream? What... If everything comes to fruition over the next 20, 30 years, what could the world look like when it comes to treating eye diseases? How different could it be? …

Dr Aykut Demirkol is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Harkness Eye Institute, working with Professor Stephen Tsang on new gene therapies to correct retinal diseases. This is SUCH an important area in the future of medicine, as so many people around the world are debilitated by eye diseases. I asked if I could drop by for an update.

If you want to understand the future of healthcare, a good place to start is with the past, and in particular the work of an amazing inventor who changed the world, Margaret Crane. One day in 1967 she was looking at pregnancy testing technology in the company she worked for when she had an epiphany …