High-Tech Healthcare: Today's Innovations Are Powering Tomorrow's Medicine

Microneedle patches, handheld diagnostic machines, and better sensing capabilities, as well as 3D bioprinting, are just a few of the technologies coming to a doctor’s office near you—or maybe even into your home—in the next decade.

- Michelle Z. Donahue

Even when it’s moving at a slow speed, watching Rohit Bhargava’s 3D printer in action is mesmerizing. As the pointed tip of the printer head moves, it begins to extrude a thin, shining tube of what looks like plastic. The nozzle moves away and begins to draw out another tube. Then suddenly they’re connected; joined by other tubes to become a complex three-dimensional shape: a tiny, anatomically accurate replica of a heart.

The tubes aren’t plastic; they’re made of isomalt, a soluble material. And though the heart is impressive, Bhargava’s ultimate targets are much more subtle: ducts and vessels in the human body where cancer can take root. These delicate filigrees are seeded with cells from the human body, then enclosed in wobbly cylinders of collagen where the isomalt dissolves. What remains are models of real human anatomies made of living cells: a 3D platform to study disease as though you’re within the body itself.

As the head of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s innovative Cancer Center, Bhargava has been plugging away at injecting more advanced engineering solutions into medical problems. The freeform 3D printer is one of the first futuristic achievements of that effort.

But Bhargava’s project is just one of a wave of technologies that stand to transform medicine and healthcare as we know it; to make them faster, more accurate, and hopefully, drastically more affordable. Microneedle patches, handheld diagnostic machines, and better sensing capabilities, as well as 3D bioprinting, are just a few of the technologies coming to a doctor’s office near you—or maybe even into your home—in the next decade.