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.

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To scale AI the world needs more data centers to house and run the necessary IT equipment. The current data center supply is 70 gigawatts but in five years or so, we’ll use an estimated 220 gigawatts, according to McKinsey. That means we’ll need to find space to build more data centers and the energy to power them.

That is where U.S. startup Starcloud comes in. It wants to enable a transition from terrestrial data centers to building them in space, a shift that promises to have a major impact on how we store and protect the world’s data.

The transition is likely to take about 20 years but “in ten years almost all new data centers will be in space,” predicts Philip Johnston, Starcloud's CEO.

Customers won’t have to wait that long. If all goes according to plan, Starcloud, a World Economic Forum 2025 Technology Pioneer, will begin by selling compute to NASA and U.S. Department of Defense earth constellation satellites and start serving enterprise customers from space later this year, Johnston said during an interview with The Innovator. He expects Starcloud’s orbital data centers to be able to slash the energy cost of inference by 10X.

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