Meirluc,
Today you're completely right, the cost of personalized drugs for all sorts of illnesses would be prohibitive. Technology could change all of that. I suspect that years from now a blood sample may be all that's needed for many personalized drugs, and once you have the sample, much of the process will be nearly completely automated. It won't happen overnight, but I believe it will be the future.
Today surgery is often done robotic-ally, but Drs. are in charge. In time, it's very possible that the computers will completely control the robots, or nano-bots will be injected and do the surgery without even a single cut. I doubt I'll be alive to see it, but my kids will.
I suspect that vaccines will lower the incidence of cancer, and other diseases, and also play a much greater role in it's cure, our vaccines are just the beginning. I frankly wonder if our DCVax-Direct couldn't be made from a patient who appeared healthy which might eliminate cancers that could be found only as molecules inside the body. Of course attempting such a trial is nearly impossible, you'd have to recruit thousands of healthy people and track them for decades to see if they had fewer cancer incidents than the general population, and of course you'd probably also give boosters to some, but not all, to determine if they were necessary.
I suspect the day will come when our annual checkup will include some sort of full body scan, it won't be that expensive as it will be done by a machine that's almost totally automatic, and results are determined by computers. Cancers and other problems will be able to be dealt with while they're tiny and may not show symptoms for many months, or even a few years.
Gary
