If you were of the generation to see the Star Wars movies on original release, you might have dismissed as unlikely science fiction the scenes in which Luke Skywalker loses a hand to a light sabre and almost immediately reappears with a bionic replacement that looks and responds like the real thing. In a generation, Canadian amputees were being fitted with prostheses that can be controlled by thought, bringing the bionic replacement closer to reality.

In the next generation, perhaps transplanted limbs will become as familiar as prosthetics. Just a year ago U.S. veteran Sergeant Brendan Marrocco, who had lost all four limbs to an improvised explosive device (IED) in 2009, became the seventh person to have a successful double arm transplant in a 13-hour operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Think limb transplants will never become routine? The first heart transplant was performed in 1967. Just a year ago, the University of Ottawa Heart Institute performed its 500th heart transplant, one of about 30 performed there each year. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the day when limb transplants are not just a reality, but commonplace, too.

Brave New World

Even a casual stroll on the Internet reveals the rapid pace of medical technology, delivering advances that previous generations might describe as miraculous, and giving us a glimpse into future developments.

In the fall, the first North American diabetes patient was fitted with a new wearable device that automatically and continuously monitors blood sugar and administers insulin as required. It’s an advance on the insulin pump, which is replacing manual insulin injections, and brings the artificial pancreas another step closer to reality. This is good news for the nearly one million Canadians with type 1 diabetes, who perform a daily, lifelong balancing act involving diet, physical activity and insulin in order to prevent serious health complications like blindness, kidney disease and cardiovascular disease.

The device is about the size of a small cellphone and clips on a waistband; it’s connected to sensors and an insulin pump attached to the wearer’s skin. Sensors monitor blood sugar levels and computers in the device calculate and deliver the right amount of insulin at the right time.

The Canadian Diabetes Association has funded research at the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal investigating a device that delivers both insulin and glucagon, the hormones that regulate blood glucose levels in the body. Diabetics must regularly test blood glucose levels to deal with highs and lows, for instance, taking insulin to lower it after meals or something sugary to raise it during exercise. But it’s tough to continuously monitor changes, particularly during sleep, when blood sugar can plummet. Adding glucagon to a computerized pump system could eliminate that worry.

It’s safe to say that further development holds the promise of a true artificial pancreas, one that will relieve type 1 diabetics of the constant balancing act. Many manufacturers have devices in development, and that will likely mean that the price, now over $7,000, is likely to come down, too.

Meanwhile, research sprints ahead on replacing the finger-prick method of testing blood glucose levels with needle-less methods, including a glucose breathalyzer and nano biosensors that can analyse glucose levels from teardrops or urine or a skin sample. It’s hoped a less painful way of measurement will result in better control of blood sugar levels, and fewer health consequences from poorly managed diabetes.

Scanner Detects Skin Cancer

A new handheld scanner for melanoma has also come on the market. Canadian Cancer Society statistics say 6,000 Canadians a year develop melanoma and more than a thousand die. Although the survival rate is high if it is detected early, melanoma can be fatal if it spreads elsewhere in the body.

But it can be hard for a dermatologist to tell early-stage melanoma apart from unharmful skin abnormalities, especially on someone richly endowed with moles of various colours, sizes and shapes.

This device provides dermatologists with extra information to help them determine when a biopsy is in order. The device is placed over the mole. Special lights are shone on the skin to reveal the structure of the lesion below the surface. The computerized device then analyses the lesion, compares it to a vast number of melanoma images in its database and in less than a minute, produces an assessment.

In a large clinical trial in the U.S., the device missed fewer than two per cent of early cancers. The device is available only to physicians today, but it’s not hard to imagine a future in which a variation of the device will be available for consumer use, perhaps as common as the blood pressure stations in pharmacies today.

In the 2013 film Elysium, starring Matt Damon, mansions come with machines that seemingly cure every human ailment in about the same time it takes to get a full-body scan today. Will such technology ever move from science fiction into realty? A century ago, who would have dreamt of nanoparticles used to target and kill tumours while leaving healthy tissue unaffected, or a 3-D printer that can use a patient’s own cells to create cartilage to replace a missing ear?