Insights

Jameel Health is proud to play a part in the development of AgeTech solutions that could help older people live healthy lives. Read more.

Globally, healthcare spending is growing faster than most economies. Is that because the more you spend, the better health outcomes you achieve? Unfortunately, not. Some countries seem to get better health outcomes for less money. High spenders take note; low spenders take heart.

Some diseases are so prevalent they have become familiar to everyone – think heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia, to name just a few. If you yourself are not one of the millions of sufferers worldwide, then chances are you have a friend of family member who is. Yet many diseases – equally pernicious, equally devastating – slip under the radar because their incidence is relatively rare. Although definitions vary around the world, a disease is often classed as ‘rare’ if it affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people, or less than 0.05% of a given population.

Scientists had long been eyeing mRNA as a revolutionary weapon in the war against cancer. The avalanche of funding, resources and talent that poured into the mRNA field heralded a game-changing moment in cancer research. It promised nothing less than a new breed of mRNA treatments designed to boost the body’s immune response against unwanted cell mutation.

For most of human history, even the tiniest of scratches could prove fatal. Never mind pneumonia, childbirth or surgery, gardening was a potentially deadly pursuit. A graze or scratch could become infected, and there was very little you could about it apart from hoping the harmful microbes didn’t spread. It was basically your immune system versus the bacteria.

In medical lexicon ‘metabolic syndrome’ (MetS) might not exactly trip from the tongue like ‘heart disease’ or ‘cancer’. Yet, depending on where you live in the world, there could be a one-in-three chance you have the condition already. And despite its relative obscurity, be in no doubt: its impact is life threatening.