The Biggest Disruptive Innovations In Life Science History

The world of life sciences is one that highly prioritises fast-moving innovation and disruption to the existing way of doing things.

To a degree, this desire for disruption is at the centre of medicine, as new medicines, medical devices and approaches serve to make previous approaches obsolete, and life science marketing is on hand to show the masses why this new approach changes everything.

This is why, for example, leeches are not used in medicine outside of very specific surgical procedures (such as after tissue grafts). Medical innovations and changes in our knowledge base have made the concept of leeching and bloodletting obsolete.

With this in mind, here are some of the biggest disruptive innovations that changed the face of life sciences.

Minimally Invasive Surgery

Less an individual innovation and more an overall approach to surgical treatment, the development of arthroscopic and laparoscopic surgical techniques helped to completely change how many medical conditions are treated.

In the past, open surgery was the norm but since the early 2000s, its use has become far more limited, given that scarring is minimal, recovery times are faster and there is a reduced risk of complications with minimally invasive surgery.

Open surgery is still used for many types of neurosurgery, but the focus of medical professionals is to use the least invasive option wherever it is available.

Pacemaker

Cardiac arrhythmia is where the heart beats too quickly or too slowly, which can cause heart palpitations, lightheadedness, strokes, heart failure and even sudden death in some cases.

Before the development of electronic devices that could help to manage a heart rate, people with an irregular heartbeat lived in pain and fear, but the development of the pacemaker from its initial discovery in 1889 until its first use in 1958 has kept people alive for years, if not decades more.

In fact, the very first patient to receive a pacemaker, Arne Larsson lived to the age of 86, outliving the inventor and surgeon who provided him with that change.

Vaccination

Smallpox used to be a very common, highly infectious and highly fatal disease, with a mortality rate of up to 35 per cent.

However, vaccination, a more controlled form of a variolation tradition that had been used for hundreds of years, found that if a person was infected with a less harmful part of a virus or bacterium, the body could resist future attempts at infection.

This concept would become widespread and lead to the worldwide eradication of the disease, with the final known fatal case occurring in 1978.

The Human Genome Project

One of the most ambitious projects in scientific history, the Human Genome Project was a worldwide attempt to create a complete genetic blueprint for human beings.

This was achieved by determining the order of DNA bases, making a map that showed the locations for particular genetic information, and creating linkage maps to track inherited traits.

This knowledge, more than most, transformed modern life sciences as we know it, allowing for the study and treatment of rare diseases, improve diagnostic procedures and help to predict and stop diseases before they progress.