Science magazine presents each year a special issue on the scientific breakthroughs of the year. It ranks the 10 most important discoveries and breakthroughs, and this usually triggers many interesting business trends and opportunities. This year, 5 out of 10 breakthroughs are related to healthcare.

The breakthrough of this year has to do with the human genome, or more interestingly, with your particular genome, or mine, and what it can tell us about our backgrounds and the quality of our futures. Scientists have moved this year from asking what in our DNA makes us human, to striving to know what in my DNA makes me “me”.

I can imagine today is a great day at 23andme headquarters (see previous post where we discussed this promising new start-up). Today, techniques that scan for hundreds of thousands of genetic differences at once are linking particular variations to particular traits and diseases in ways not possible before. Already, the genomes of several individuals have been sequenced, and rapid improvements in sequencing technologies will make the sequencing of "me" a real possibility.

These were the other healthcare related runner-ups:

- Research on how to reprogram skin cells to make them look and act like embryonic stem (ES) cells. ES cells are famous for their potential to become any kind of cell in the body. But because researchers derive them from early embryos, they are also infamous for the political and ethical debates that they have sparked. This breakthrough will foster research allowing more and more new breakthroughs in the coming years.

- The discovery of the molecular structure of the adrenalines’s target, the beta2-adrenergic receptor. Having a clear picture of the receptor's binding site will allow the development of more potent, safer drugs.

- Research on how immune cells specialize for immediate or long-term protection

- New insights on neural mechanisms for memory and imagination, linking both concepts in a revolutionary way. It appears that recalling past life experiences and imagining future experiences activated a similar network of brain regions. On the basis of such findings, some researchers propose that the brain's memory systems may use remembered fragments of past events to construct possible futures. As science magazine writers say “memory may indeed turn out to be the mother of imagination”.

See the whole article here, and a video prepared by science magazine.

And by the way, Merry Christmas to everybody.