"What Scientific Breakthrough Are We Closer To Than Most People Realize?" (40 Answers)

Vaccines for herpes and Lyme's Disease are in deep (successful) clinical trials and should be available to the public very soon.

Insanely effective cancer treatments.

Cell therapy is absolutely crazy, and it's available for a fair few diseases

I have a lot of family that works in different pharma companies. We were recently discussing that there is a very promising treatment for Alzheimers in the works that could stop the progression of the disease and maybe reverse some of the brain damage. It's still in testing phase and wouldn't be on the market for years but it's something that would be awesome to be able to use.

Susan Shore's auricle device is capable of treating tinnitus (reducing volume by up to 75% after 12 weeks of treatment) and is approved for FDA

A cure for HIV seems to be on the horizon, some scientists managed to "cut" it out of cells using CRISPR last year.

A cure for symptomatic rabies! Using monoclonal antibodies, scientists were able to alter the immune response in rats CNS significantly into infection.  This is awesome because before this treatment, once you showed symptoms you were essentially dead. Rabies is also a lot more common in Asia and Africa, with roughly 56k cases a year.

Early diagnosis and treatment of Parkinson's, I think. I've been following a story for a few years now of a woman who could smell Parkinson's and is now working with researchers to turn her weird unique ability into an early screening test.

Treating depression with neuromodulation therapy instead of medications. Stanford is heavily involved in clinical trials using their [SAINT treatment].

It essentially uses transcranial magnetic stimulation in a similar way to DBS but is less invasive and better tolerated. (I’m trying to get into one of their clinical trials). I’m looking forward to a day when I don’t need medication to stop me from wanting to die. I’m on antidepressant number 7 or 8 at this point and finding one that works, doesn’t make me manic, doesn’t kill my libido, and doesn’t make me gain weight is impossible. Currently taking Vilazodone which isn’t too bad, but probably not as efficacious as it should be.

Earthquake warning system up to 2 hours.

Permanent GPS antennas are located all over the world and more densely at fault zones. About a year ago geologists found that if they stacked all historical GPS data proximal to large earthquakes, they saw there is a very small acceleration of the surface about two hours before the actual earthquake.

We are literally only missing the technology to make even more precise GPS measures, so we can do this in real time on singular regions. It is proven that this is an actual thing that happens and we can literally warn of earthquakes with a significant time span.

> And the land movement is so subtle that only by lumping all the data together did the precursor stand out, Bletery says. “If you just remove one or two quakes, you still see it,” he says. “But if you remove half, it’s hard to see.”

This is not a solution or has saved any lives, but it is an absolutely staggering discovery that will have an insane focus in the upcoming years.

https://www.science.org/content/article/warning-signs-detected-hours-ahead-big-earthquakes

Growing transplantable organs

Growing back your own enamel instead of needing crowns/replacements.

Large scale water desalinization

It may seem trivial to most people, but access to fresh water and water purification are the largest problems on the planet. Desalinization has been extremely expensive for years and never has the investment needed to break the scalability barrier.

Well, our friends in the Middle East claim to have made some huge accomplishments over the last few years thanks to graphene and access to abundant power. Their new plants should be coming online next year.

Not having to worry about access to clean water would mean massive jumps in agriculture, industrialization and population

Targeted cures for neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS etc). I’m currently doing my PhD in a new style of vaccine for AD and the advancements that have been made in the last few years are incredible. Immunotherapies really are the next major step aside from gene editing.

Edit to clarify wording: as several replies to this comment have stated, “cure” is a strong word. There has been a big shift in recent years towards a more preventative approach in treatment research, rather than reactive treatments. Unfortunately with neurodegenerative diseases, by the time you’re seeing the symptoms, it may be too late to effectively treat the condition (as is the case with AD and Parkinson’s, I won’t comment too much on MS as it is admittedly a bit out of my field, though the general principles are similar in terms of *my* research). So rather than “curing” the condition after it has already manifested and presented symptoms, we (and other researchers) are hoping to develop treatments that don’t necessarily halt disease progression, but work to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Sorry for any confusion, hope this clarifies things.

The breakthrough happened ~ cleaning the oceans of garbage. Now it needs to be more than a ship or two.

A technological leap forward in battery storage capacity, cheaper and lighter weight. This will have the biggest impact on everyday life.

Believe it or not, communicating with animals by translating brain waves into human language. Apparently AI research is on the verge of doing so.

Semaglutide (ozempic, wegovy) in pill form at a greatly reduced price. Wegovy also has been proven to reduce cardiovascular disease in particular and make recurring cardiac events less likely for patients who've already experienced a cardiac event. Some independent pharmacies are already creating semaglutide pills. 

Psychedelics as a treatment for mental illness. We are going to improve our ability to actually help people instead of offering them meds and crossing our fingers.

Understanding how hormones and mental illness are linked, especially in women who previously were diagnosed with mental illness but who had endocrine disorders. And to add, menopause! In response to the Lancet's awful claim of "over medicalization" scores of researchers the world over have doubled down to learn more!

They're hoping that a new d**g will be available for use by 2030 that essentially grows your teeth back. It stimulates stem cells in your tooth pulp and encourages growth.

(Also to my understanding this d**g was originally being tested as an alzheimer treatment in japan.)