Session 6

Time flies and this week is already week 6, and projects and mid-terms are around the corner!

This week's TWC lesson was about the BioBusiness Revolution: Healthcare and the Biomedical Sciences: Past, Present, Future.

So what is BioBusiness? Biobusiness is actually the commercial activity based on an understanding of life sciences and life science processes which consists of biomedical, agri-veterinary, environment/Industrial and other areas.

Biobusiness has been on the rise and the main sectors that contributed to it are agriculture, healthcare and food sector which made up approximately 1/3 of the total bio-business each.  As can be seen from the diagram below,

It can be seen that Biobusiness has changed people's lives over the years. In the past, death and disability was mainly due to the communicable diseases in the 1990s probably because of the lack of proper healthcare. However, it was projected that in 2020, the global number 1 killer is actually heart diseases and even road traffic accidents become the top 10 killer of the world. Communicable diseases would be lesser while chronic diseases such as HIVs and heart diseases will increase. How would this happen? Due to the advancement of technology and biobusiness, improvement of sanitation and quality of life, people are living longer and healthier, hence chronic diseases are only discovered after they went through the stage of surviving the communicable diseases.

For the readings, perhaps most of us were held up with mid terms, reports and presentation deadlines, not many of us really went to read through the readings. Hence, the discussions were not very fruitful and prof basically skipped the readings that nobody actually read. Nonetheless, we still talked about a few readings.

For the presentation this week, there were 5 people presenting, consisting of counterfeit drugs, toilets, organ trading, biotech drugs and pacemaker but I’ll just touch on the topic that I presented on which is the pacemaker and its impact on the society.

Pacemakers are devices that consist of a pulse generator, electrodes and a lead and deliver electrical impulses to the heart so as to regulate the heartbeat to ensure that blood is circulated to the brain and the body.   

Its advantages are that it kept patients alive in complete heart block whose prognosis without pacing would have been extremely poor, and beginning in the mid-1960s it enabled many of them to enjoy moderately active lives.

The doctor could noninvasively and repeatedly change pacing rate, pulse duration and amplitude, sensitivity of the electrodes to spontaneous electrical activity within the heart, and other parameters.

However, there are also drawbacks to the internal pacemaker which is the battery of the pacemaker may run low in the future, hence requiring further surgical procedures.        

Nonetheless, Pacemaker brought about a lot of advantages in the medical history and saved a lot of lives and was constantly refined to suit to new heart disease which resulted in prolonged mortality rate. Hence, I think it was a great invention!

For this week’s session I would give it a 7.5/10 as I think there is room for more discussion on the other biobusiness sectors and we didn’t talk much due to time constraints.