| In the future people will wear watches that monitor much more about their health than they do today. When a patient walks into a doctor’s office, the physician could simply read the results and then administer -either through an injection or pill -engineered advanced probiotic systems such as microbes, cells and fungi known as living therapeutics. Once inside the body these living therapeutics are designed to serve as a kind of drug factory, producing the right amount of treatment in the right place, at the right time, over the long term. The promise is that another outside dose may never be required because an important feature of this approach is the ability to include biological control mechanisms that regulate therapeutic production – either through patient-managed triggers or in response to specific clinically recognized disease signals. Once a wide range of living therapeutics gain regulatory approval and are commercialized, drug production could shift from pharmaceutical facilities to biological processes within patients, potentially opening new frontiers in how and where healing occurs. This in turn could make the long-term care of people with chronic or deadly diseases cheaper and more effective in developed countries and change the game in developing countries where people can’t afford to regularly buy medicine and cold chains don’t exist. It is just one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2025 named in a report released June 24 by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the scientific publisher Frontiers. The report spotlights scientific progress addressing real-world challenges that are ready to be commercialized within a five-year horizon. | 
