The scientific advances ready to change the world: the Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2026

Kimmy Bettinger, Expert and Knowledge Communities Lead, World Economic Forum: Every year there are a few scientific advances that reach the moment where they're ready to change the world. And this report is how we find and share them.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week we're looking at ten emerging technologies that might be set to change the world in the next five years.

Kimmy Bettinger: It is interesting every year to zoom out and look at the cohort of 10 and say, you know, do we see any signals around where the frontier might be heading?

Robin Pomeroy: In that report, we learned about revolutionary health care treatments, how we can rethink, how we generate and store energy by AI quantum and biotechnologies.

Kimmy Bettinger: Some of these technologies are becoming much more personal, personalised cancer vaccines and things like that, where we're really starting to think instead of like a population average, we're moving towards technologies that are addressing an individual, a really specific need.

Robin Pomeroy: Follow Radio Davos wherever you get podcasts or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you'll also find our sister programmes, meet the leader, one-on-one interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world and agenda dialogues, the full audio from the best discussions at World Economic Forum events, including the annual meeting in Davos.

I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum. And with this look at the top 10 emerging technologies of 2026...

Kimmy Bettinger: It really shifts the way science is happening.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Welcome to Radio Davos and yes this week we're talking about technologies that could change all our lives in the next five years and to talk about that I'm joined by my colleague Kimmy Bettinger, hi Kimmy, how are you?

Kimmy Bettinger: Hi Robin, I'm great, great to be here with you today.

Robin Pomeroy: It's great to see you. I'm so glad we've got someone who knows about these technologies because I have in front of me the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 report, which you helped put together. Tell us what you do at the forum, and then tell us about the report.

Kimmy Bettinger: I lead our work on emerging technologies for the Forum. I'm based in our San Francisco office, so helping to connect our global partners and communities with what's really on the forefront of innovation in the Bay Area and beyond.

Robin Pomeroy: Right. And this report is kind of the flagship, maybe, of your work through the year. Tell us the history or something about the Top 10 Tech report.

Kimmy Bettinger: Every year there are a few scientific advances that reach the moment where they're ready to change the world. And this report is how we find and share them.

We've been publishing the report for 14 years. So we have a really exciting corpus of technologies that we can look back on and understand what scaled, what solved, and what might still be to come.

Robin Pomeroy: You have a great corpus of work. We have a good corpus of podcasts as well, and viewers can go back. I think for the last six of these reports, we've done really interesting podcasts.

It's one of my favourite episodes of Radio Davos of the year, because what you've got here are 10 technologies that a jury of experts has decided, because there must be hundreds, thousands of technologies that are being worked on, but you've stripped it down to 10. Just tell us how that comes about, this list of 10.

Kimmy Bettinger: You're right. We start with a really broad list of technologies. We're scanning across many academic fields, many industry sectors, and we get the chance to then talk to the world leading experts in different fields to understand how might we think about this set of technologies, which ones really have momentum. And then we go back and look at some of the quantitative signals, too.

We're looking at things like how is this moving in academia? What sort of funding are we seeing? How many patents are we seeing in this space right now? And how's that starting to accelerate.

From there, we take the list to our advisory council. This is a group of world leading experts that sit across a wide range of kind of innovation spaces, and they help us select that final 10.

And really that advisory council is helping us think about impact. Not only which technologies are most likely to scale. But which ones will be most consequential for the world should they get to mainstream adoption.

Robin Pomeroy: That's why this list is so interesting. It's not just 10 cool ideas. These are 10 technologies which, according to your expert council, could be scaling up in the next five years and could have a big impact. So it's actually not just cool tech, it is cool tech, but it could have big impacts on real lives.

I'm going to talk to you a bit more about this idea of scaling of technologies a bit later, but why don't we just crack on and we're going to go through the top 10. I think we'll talk about scaling halfway through the list. Remind me that's our plan.

As we set off at the bottom of this mountain of 10 things, small mountain, here we go one by one through the report. I'm going to read out what the technology is and you're going tell me all about it.

Kimmy Bettinger: Okay.

Robin Pomeroy: Number one on the list, and they're not in any particular order, right? This is just the way you put them together in the report, it's about energy. It's everything to grid energy. What is that?

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah. So, everything to grid energy takes the nodes that are connected to our grid and turns them into a smarter system.

So you can think about things like an electric vehicle, a commercial building, a rooftop of solar panels, even maybe a battery in a storage warehouse. And it really takes these nodes and says, okay, not only can you draw down power from the grid, but you can now store power, you can send it back to the grid, and that means that we can manage demand in real time.

Have you ever spent a summer in, let's say, New York City? I guess Geneva summers can get quite hot. Yeah.

Robin Pomeroy: It does. We don't have much air conditioning. If you're going to talk about air conditioning, I'm sure it's coming, but not yet.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, I spent a few really hot summers in New York City. The kind where you step outside and you can feel the heat coming off the sidewalk, or you can really hear the hum of the air conditioners as you walk down the street.

And that moment is really, that heat really puts a tonne of strain on the grid. You are at a moment where any spike in demand can send things out of balance and it happens everywhere in the world, at any place where there's that type of heat.

And so what everything to grid energy does is it provides us with stability, agility and resilience.

And I will say, I think that when we look at kind of the pull factors in the moment of time that we're in, we're starting to hear conversations about the energy demands of AI. And so when we're already at a point where grids can be really stressed by increasing temperatures and we have this new force coming in, it's really important that we start to think about how might we reimagine that grid.

Robin Pomeroy: So you talk about nodes. Let me just read a sentence from the report. "Buildings, vehicles, and devices are no longer just electricity consumers. They are now active resources that can help reimagine the grid."

So basically, your electric vehicle has a battery in it. It can go both ways. It can store electricity. It could put electricity back in the grid. Because there are times if the wind's blowing hard, the sun's shining, renewable energies are producing lots of energy which sometimes can't be consumed. It can be stored, not necessarily in a massive battery somewhere, but in lots of individual ones, anywhere where this small scale technology is available.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And some of the things that are really making that possible actually are new battery chemistries that allow for that type of grid scale storage, which is quite cool. And we're also starting to see some innovations in kind of the way that we can move energy back and forth that bi-directional flow. So this is really starting to become possible in an exciting way.

Robin Pomeroy: Right, that's mentioned in the report here. Newer chemistries for batteries, such as lithium and sodium batteries. Some can charge faster. Some can last longer. So this is also hardware. So you've got chemistry, but also hardware is mentioned here. New semiconductors that work better. And new control systems. And I'll cite it again verbatim: "New control systems letting distributed storage activity stabilise the grid rather than passively feeding it."

So it's not just we generate electricity, we're using it. It's much more subtle than that and this will stabilise the grid, to use that term.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, yeah. I had the chance to speak with Doug Arendt, who's had held a few positions at the National Lab of the Rockies in the United States. And exactly, he calls this the technology that's really the foundation for a completely reimagined grid.

Robin Pomeroy: A reimagined grid, and we often hear about one of the major challenges to the energy transition and to the AI demand, data centre demand, is grid infrastructure. This is another way of looking at that.

That's called everything to grid energy. That was number one. Kimmy, on our list.

We turn the page to number two, talking of lithium, direct lithium extraction. What is that?

Kimmy Bettinger: So you mentioned the energy transition. And we talked a little bit about batteries and the role that they play in that. Lithium is a key component of the energy transition because it's part of most of our batteries.

Direct lithium extraction is a way that we can pull lithium out of a brine in a matter of hours instead of years. We can take the water that the lithium is in and actually put it back underground. So we're able to use less water in the way that we do that. And I think most importantly, it can happen in a smaller and more modular way. So what that means is we don't require really specific geological conditions to access lithium and extract it anymore.

Actually, I should ask, do you know how we get the lithium in our batteries today?

Robin Pomeroy: I know something about the desert in Chile.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah. So right now, the way that we get to lithium is primarily through lithium ponds. And they require a high altitude desert.

So a place that this happens is the Atacama Desert in Chile. And if you look at the satellite photos of this, you kind of look down, and it looks like a piece of art. You would have no idea that this is how we're actually getting one of the key components for the future of our energy transition. There are these huge turquoise ponds that are perfectly geometric in shape and they stretch for kilometres and the way that it works right now is we kind of pour the lithium brine into these ponds and we wait sometimes for up to two years for the sun to evaporate the water so we can get to that lithium.

So really direct lithium extraction is a step change in the way it speeds up the process. It makes it more modular and actually. It unlocks some of the kind of geography of where we can do this. We no longer necessarily need a high altitude desert to get to lithium. And when we think about the increasing demands for lithium for batteries, this is really important.

Robin Pomeroy: Yeah, the current concentration in supply of lithium in the world, I think, or refining capacity, here we are, China 62%, Chile 13%, Argentina 11%, that's basically it, at the moment that's where the lithium comes from.

Kimmy Bettinger: Well, I should say lithium is a bigger supply chain. So typically, you have to extract, and then you have refine. And then you turn the lithium into battery grade material.

And so right now, what that supply chain looks like is we're moving this lithium across many, many continents. It's starting in maybe the Atacama Desert in Chile. It's going probably to China for that refinement step. And then it's maybe going back to let's say Detroit in the United States to be part of a battery for an electric vehicle.

With the lithium extraction becoming smaller and more modular, actually one of the things that people are starting to think about is can we start to co-locate the extraction and the refinement? It's now a bit more of a possibility there. So that's really exciting when we think about the entirety of that lithium supply chain as well.

Robin Pomeroy: There are also, in this report, it looks at the promise of some of these technologies, but also it looks at challenges or knock-on unintended consequences in some of them. We don't have time to mention all of those, but if listeners or viewers to this want to read that report.

One of them, a challenge to the investment in that is when a commodity gets cheaper, people don't want to invest in it so much. This says that lithium has lost over 80% of its value since 2022 and that makes so why would I then invest in a new plant making this? And that's a challenge to scale which we're going to talk about a little bit more is what's my return on investment.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, yep, that's totally true. Lithium is a commodity in that regard. But that's why I think some of these new concepts that people are exploring around co-locating the extraction and refinement actually help us to think how we might evolve around what that investment might look like.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's move on. Number three is passive radiative cooling materials. You mentioned earlier a summer in New York. This might be somewhere related to that. Tell us about passive radiating cooling materials?

Kimmy Bettinger: Well, actually, I was this week passed our colleague Espen in the hallway. He leads the energy work for the Forum, and he was talking to me about the cooling paradox. Have you heard about that?

Robin Pomeroy: No, let me say no.

Kimmy Bettinger: Okay, so basically cooling a building takes a lot of electricity and that electricity creates heat. That heat then turns the surrounding environment hotter which means we need even more cooling. It's the type of positive feedback loop that you you really don't want.

Now with passive radiative cooling, imagine a paint that cools itself. We can use it as a coating. And what it can do is it actually sends heat up directly to deep space. We bypass our atmosphere, and so it allows us to cool things without using electricity. You can imagine putting it on a roof, and it can actually drop the temperature of a building below the temperature the air around it. And this is exciting when you think about some of the hottest places on Earth. And the applications there, they might become more livable with less need for air conditioning.

Robin Pomeroy: This is, to some extent, climate change adaptation, isn't it, which all over the world we'll need to face. And one of the things we'll need to face is more frequent heat waves and just generally higher temperatures.

But in cities, so urban heat islands are now, on average, 0.5 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than surrounding rural areas. I mean parks, trees, those things we know can help, providing shade, green areas, that can reduce the heat island if cities are well designed. What you're talking about here is materials, things like paint, roof tiles, window films, and heavy duty fabrics applied, and any of those things could be applied to new construction or retrofitted into existing ones.

Oh, and even here's another thing I underlined here. A company in the United Kingdom has developed a coating for power cables that can keep them cool enough to carry more electricity as well. So there's lots of reasons we need to cool, and these are ways that are fairly low cost, as you were saying.

Kimmy Bettinger: Exactly, and I actually think the big opportunity here, of course, is for people, for our communities, but there are other applications that are really, really interesting that we're starting to explore.

When we think about supply chains, this is maybe a way that we can start to keep supply chains more stable. We can think about keeping factories open or in locations that previously weren't viable because of heat and things like that. And we can keep schools open at different times of year. So I really think that this is one of those technologies that has a really wide range of opportunity space.

Robin Pomeroy: Some of it's kind of old technology as well. I mean, you talk about Geneva compared to New York. Geneva has almost no air conditioning. Some shops have it, but some offices have it. But houses don't, and schools don't. Would you believe? And they're getting to a point now where either they have to close schools, or they're going to have to really rethink. And I think a lot of this could be achieved without air conditioning with things like, what do they call it, window films, certain paints, building materials, a lot of which can be retrofitted.

That was called. Oh, let's say one other thing. You mentioned how this could, because it's a low-cost thing, how it could really also help in lower income countries. Think of very hot countries that aren't the richest countries. Some of these technologies could be very effective there. Energy savings using passive radiative cooling materials, according to this report, could reach up to 40%, you could save 40% of your energy if you adopted some of these technologies.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, we're starting to see some smaller pilots and studies that are showing that scale of energy saving, which is really exciting.

Robin Pomeroy: Passive radiative cooling materials.

Onto number four, which starts with an acronym. Let me see if you know what the acronym stands for. I've got it written down here. It is PFAS destruction.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, so PFAS is the set of chemicals that make pans nonstick, or they make things like firefighting foam work. And we call them forever chemicals.

Robin Pomeroy: Come on, what's the acronym?

Kimmy Bettinger: It's per- and poly-, Robin, I can't pronounce this. It's per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. I probably butchered that. But essentially, these are what we call forever chemicals.

I actually had the chance. As you can tell, organic chemistry wasn't my area of expertise when I was in school. I did have the chance to speak with one of the world leading experts from China recently. And he was explaining the reason why we call PFAS forever chemicals is because they're actually based on the carbon-fluorine bond, which is one of the strongest in organic chemistry.

Robin Pomeroy: And they're designed to be forever chemicals.

Kimmy Bettinger: Exactly.

Robin Pomeroy: These are things for, what did you say, there is this heat, water and chemical breakdown, they're deliberately designed using that bond, the carbon-fluorine bond, so they don't break. The trouble is, when you stop using them, or they're polluting the environment, they don't biodegrade.

Kimmy Bettinger: Exactly, so we've found PFAS in places like the Arctic, it's in rainwater on every continent in the world, and even actually in the bloodstream of almost everyone we've tested for it.

Historically, we've been able to contain PFAS, but we've never been able to break that bond, that carbon fluorine bond.

The exciting thing is we now have figured out how to do that. We're able to, there are a few different approaches that we've found that can break the carbon fluorine bond. And that's really exciting because what it means is that for communities, maybe that live by contaminated land or water, we no longer just have to contain the problem. We can actually start to solve it.

Robin Pomeroy: One of the techniques is running contaminated water across specialised electrodes. So it uses the electrical current to strip out PFAS molecules, which can then be dealt with. Interesting.

I mean, who would be doing this? Who would be pulling out these forever chemicals and breaking them down?

Kimmy Bettinger: So right now we're early days with this technology and we're still kind of in this like moment where we're moving from research to development. And a lot of this is actually government funded. Governments have a big incentive to start to clean up kind of these contaminated sites for a few reasons. One, for the health of their citizens. It's really important that we're able to kind of provide clean drinking water and clean land and things like that.

The reason this is also interesting is because of the kind of maybe commercial avenues this might open up. Land that was previously considered untouchable is now something that we can maybe start to repurpose and invest in and use in different ways, so starting to see that happen there.

Robin Pomeroy: And this report, also for each of these things, as I say, it looks at the advantages, potential challenges, potential unintended disadvantages, and also what might be required to get them moving at scale. And policy is something that comes in to all of these to a greater or lesser extent. And this is one where, if there are government requirements to clean up that land or whatever, this is where this technology would have a real use.

Kimmy Bettinger: And I should say, we have made amazing strides when it comes to PFAS containment in recent years. There are new policies that are being put in place right now around containing these forever chemicals. These are big recent milestones.

What PFAS destruction does is actually say, OK, can we take that one step further? Instead of just creating a policy or regulation around containment, can we start to think about getting rid of them in totality.

Robin Pomeroy: That was PFAS destruction.

We're almost at the halfway point of our top 10 tech. The next one is precision fermentation.

Kimmy Bettinger: So precision fermentation is a process where we can give microbes, like let's say a simple microbe like a yeast, a new set of instructions so that it can produce something that we might want, like a protein or a fat molecule or something along those lines.

What these microbes are able to produce is identical to what we might get from the other kind of more traditional ways of doing that.

So for example, we can get a whey protein that would be identical to what we would get from a cow, which is really interesting. In particular, when we think about one of the challenges we're facing, I recently heard this stat that by 2050 we'll have a world population of nine billion people and we're going to have to feed them all.

The way we do that right now, the math doesn't work to scale that. We've already hit quite a few of our planetary limits on land use, on water use, and emissions. And so precision fermentation presents us with an alternative way that we might get to some of those needs around food and things like that.

The other thing I love about precision fermentation actually is because it's a process, the outputs aren't just food related. We are also starting to see really exciting things happen in developing kind of cosmetic ingredients or even chemicals that we used to have to get from fossil fuels.

Robin Pomeroy: And it's already being used, this technology, right? If you're a bodybuilder, like me, and you're buying whey protein, those things in the big tubs, some of that, that's very often produced, it could have been produced from milk, I guess, that's what whey would have been, but now it can be created as a non-dairy product through this.

So it works, these are big fermentation tanks in which this stuff is grown.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah. And we are starting to see some of this come to market. There are a few companies that are doing this, for example, there is a company has kind of a precision fermentation product that creates something that's eggs. And they actually have a partnership with Walmart right now. So we're definitely starting to see some other food application spaces scale, and interesting to think about. What are the other opportunities and how might this serve kind of a broader population and our broader needs?

Robin Pomeroy: And your expert panel has decided this could really have an uptick in the next five years.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, exactly.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay, we are at halfway point. That one was called, let me repeat it, precision fermentation.

Scaling then. You can have a great idea, you can work in a laboratory, but it's not going to change the world if you can't get it out at scale. What have you learned in your work at the World Economic Forum and putting together this report about how things can be moved up to a greater scale?

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, so we talked about how we've been doing this report for 14 years. I actually get asked this question a lot. Where are the technologies now that you've highlighted in previous editions? And I can say that some of them have scaled. Some took a lot longer to scale than we thought they would.

Robin Pomeroy: Than five years, which is the timeline of this.

Kimmy Bettinger: And some of them have stalled out. And when we look back to understand why might that be, for the most part, the reason isn't the technology. The research is there and really strong, and we're seeing the development is there.

And it tends to come down to three things. The first is whether the pieces around it are ready. So for example, we first identified mRNA in 2014. The science was solid. But there was no good way to get the mRNA into human cells. The missing piece was the delivery system, and that didn't come around until 2018.

Robin Pomeroy: So mRNA vaccines, we're familiar with that from the COVID vaccine. And you're saying that technology had been identified by one of these annual reports on the top 10 tech, but it required a missing piece to move that technology forward. And that can be a stumbling block or slowing down the development of things. But you said there are a couple of other things.

Kimmy Bettinger: So the second factor that we've identified from looking back at the 14 years is whether there's someone who's ready to take that first bet, to really go for it with an early version. Because usually the early version is rougher and definitely more expensive. So someone needs to be willing to work with that.

Sometimes that happens because the need is so severe. So for example we've identified liquid biopsy in a previous edition. Oncologists were willing to work with it when it was expensive and unproven because the rate of recurrence around cancer was really high and they had nothing else available to them. And their patients needed something to solve that problem.

Other times we see government creating that push. So for example, South Australia backed that first big grid battery after their power crisis. And then of course, there's sometimes a company that just has resources, and I guess the nerve to go first on that.

Robin Pomeroy: Great, well, let's get back into it.

You're listening to Radio Davos from the World Economic Forum. And we're looking at the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026. We've talked about five of them. Let's do the other five. Kimmy Bettinger is here with me talking us through these.

Number six on the list is, let me see if I pronounce this right, exosome drug delivery.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yes, so we have, as we've highlighted in previous years, and we'll get to talk about in a little bit, incredible advancements in medicine. We now have medicines that can find a single diseased cell and target it specifically. We have medicines can turn off a mutation or even edit a gene. But a medicine is only useful if it can get to the place that it needs to go.

It turns out we actually have a delivery mechanism in our bodies already that can help us do this. It's the exosome. The exosomes.

Robin Pomeroy: We're all familiar with it. It's the old exosome. When was the exosomes going to come into its own? Finally it will. What is an exosome?

Kimmy Bettinger: Okay, so your cells make a tiny packet that kind of a membrane wrapped packet that they use to send messages back and forth from each other and with exosome drug delivery...

Robin Pomeroy: So this is every cell, we know what a cell is, has an exosome, is a part of the cell, and its function, or one of its functions, is to deliver information.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yep, yep, exactly. And so what we're able to do now is actually load those couriers with a package, with a drug. And we can tell them exactly where to go. What's the delivery address. And we could use the exosomes to take the drug to where it needs to go

And this is exciting because there are certain places in the body that have been really hard for drugs to reach. Because we have kind of barriers around them for protection reasons. One of those is the blood brain barrier. And because the exosome is a courier that the body recognises, it can actually cross the blood-brain barrier. This is really exciting because that means diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's that have been really hard to treat for decades are now on the table.

Robin Pomeroy: Right, so in a nutshell, previous ways of delivering drugs into the body have often been rejected by the body. Because the body fights foreign bodies come into it. This isn't a foreign body. The exosome is part of your own body. But if you can find a way to deliver that medicine via that, I like the way it's written in the report. "You load the packet with therapeutic cargo. And then the body accepts the delivery because it recognises the courier."

It's not a foreign body delivering this drug to wherever it's needed. It is part of your own body already there, but which this medicine has been put into.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, exactly.

Robin Pomeroy: It's very interesting. You mentioned the brain diseases, like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. It also, according to your report, there have been trials on this, clinical trials, in cancer, as well as those neurological diseases, and on the long-term effects of COVID-19. And there's an example here where it seemed to be quite effective, treating pancreatic cancer.

I think a lot of people are going to be really interested in finding out more about, let me get it right, a lot of people will be interested in finding out more about exosome drug delivery.

Should we move on to the next one? Let's Do it. Number 7 on the list of 10 in no particular order is, oh here we are, heard about this already, personalised mRNA cancer vaccines.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, so personalised mRNA cancer vaccines, the way that they work is a doctor can actually take a biopsy of a specific tumour and it can read the mutations that are unique to that tumour and develop a vaccine built for that exact cancer for that exact patient in weeks.

That is incredible.

I watched a friend go through chemotherapy two years ago and one of the things that was hardest for me was just knowing that typically treatments tend to be kind of a control to damage. Chemotherapy is not necessarily kind of right size for an individual cancer or let alone an individual patient. And so this really changes the way that we can start to treat and manage these types of diseases that can be really, really hard.

And I know most people have known someone who's gone through chemotherapy or experienced something like that. So this one for me in particular feels really, really important and hopeful.

Robin Pomeroy: Everyone listening to this will know someone who's been through cancer and cancer treatment. And it always seems like cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer. You know it's going to create a lot of damage. You might open the nut, but it does create a lot of damage.

Here, the personalised, these are custom-built medicines. This is so interesting because we talk about cancer, but there are dozens of types of cancer and then each patient within that it will look different what that actual mutation is is totally different. So what you've just told us is that a sample of that actual mutation can be taken and very quickly there can be a treatment developed for that particular mutation in that particular patient.

So that sounds amazing it almost sounds too good to be true. One thing that worries me about it is it must be horribly expensive.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, right now it is quite expensive and one of the things that we think about as this should scale is making sure that we have kind of the health systems in place that we can deliver this type of treatment to everyone who needs it. So this will be a big consideration as we look to the pathway to scale as something that we need to make sure we get right.

Robin Pomeroy: Yeah, in the report here, it says, early treatments exceeding $100,000 per patient put personalised vaccines well within reach of patients.

Yeah, if you are living in a wealthy country and it's going to save your life, $100,000 might seem quite a reasonable price. But a lot of people, billions of people, aren't in that situation.

And so there are, If people read this report, there are ways of looking at how these technologies might be adapted with hybrid models that combine personalised off-the-shelf vaccines that might also give some of the benefits at a lower cost at some stage in the development of this.

I wanted to say another thing from this report. We've already looked at how some of these emerging technologies, if they scale up over the next five years, could have quite a transformative effect on the industries. So power grids will operate slightly differently because there will be these localised ones. That was one of the first technologies we looked at in the report. Here, imagine this, pharmaceutical companies now make those drugs that are used in chemotherapy on a mass scale and ship them out to people. This will totally change the kind of the industry model, won't it?

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, yeah, this is really interesting. I think in health in particular, it's primarily built around this kind of blockbuster scale model. And because of the way that research and development happens, that's kind of important for the economics of it.

What personalised mRNA cancer vaccines does, alongside other kind of breakthroughs happening in medicine right now, is actually invert that logic and say, we can, instead of creating a big one-size-fits-all approach, why don't we start to think about how we can create something specific for a specific patient?

One of the elements that might make this more cost-effective and help us think through that, is the role that AI might play in some of these processes and the discovery process there.

Should we figure that out, I think, yes, we have more personalised. It also starts to change kind of where and how this happens. So you can also think more localised in the sense that maybe you have kind of the lab just down the hall from where the patient's treatment is happening. You can walk down the hall to do that biopsy and spin up that treatment in the same building in which you are actually engaging and treating a patient.

Robin Pomeroy: Absolute paradigm shift, potentially. That technology is personalised mRNA cancer vaccines.

Let's move to number eight, which is quantum simulation. Oh, I love quantum.

Kimmy Bettinger: Why?

Robin Pomeroy: Why? Because I don't understand it, Kimmy. You're going to help me out on this one. It's not that I understand most of what we're talking about here, but quantum. You're going to test me on this. Whenever it comes up on Radio Davos, I always hope for an expert in front of me. Quantum simulation for drug discovery.

Kimmy Bettinger: Okay, so the way that this works is quantum computers can actually model a molecule using the laws of physics. So we can watch kind of a drug candidate, a molecule, fold and lock into its target atom by atom before we even have to make a single molecule in the lab. And that's a level of specificity that we currently aren't able to do. A lot of the ways that we kind of think about drug candidates is using a lot of approximation.

So this kind of changes the kind of the nature in which we're able to understand, yeah, likelihood of success.

Robin Pomeroy: So the way drugs are discovered and developed, early stages of a drug discovery, scientists don't just make some drug and inject it into a living organism, before that it's done on computers and it has been for quite some time, modelling. But what you're saying is the classic kind of modelling is not that exact.

It assumes that, let me just read this from the report, "conventional computers approximate molecular behaviour by reducing its complexity," and the same sentence continues, "quantum simulation models it directly".

So it really is the real world. This is the real molecule rather than just, we've assumed it's something a bit like this, which is kind of what computers are currently doing.

These quantum calculations, because they're much more complex, they're much faster, they can really give you a genuine assessment of what that molecule does.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, and this is exciting. I was speaking to the chief scientist at a big pharmaceutical company a few months ago, and he shared this stat with me. Nine in 10 drug candidates around the world fail trials. And again, we talked a little bit about the ...

Robin Pomeroy: Failed clinical trials, so they have started testing them.

Kimmy Bettinger: Exactly, they've kind of modelled them out, think that they might be successful and moved them into clinical trials and they failed.

Robin Pomeroy: Nine out of ten of them fail. The previous, the computer modelling had said it might work, but it didn't in nine out of 10.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, for a variety of reasons, but that definitely contributes here. So quantum simulation can really help us shift that stat a little bit.

And again, that changes the economics, because right now we're really beholden to what we can move forward into clinical trials. And if we're not succeeding there, it's slower, it's resource intensive, it's expensive, and patients' lives are on the line at the end of the day. And so this really changes that calculus.

Robin Pomeroy: There was a recent episode of Radio Davos about rare diseases. I urge people who are interested in health care and rare diseases to go out and listen to that. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world with so-called rare diseases, not that rare because there are hundreds of million of people. But each individual disease is very often, there's not, if you like, to put it in economic terms, there's just not the market there for pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments. Maybe this would help solve that.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, exactly. If we're able to kind of bolster that kind of discovery process of how we might identify a molecule before it moves into lab, and we can do that much more successfully, what that means is the economics change. And maybe that changes the way we think about what's treatable or addressable or not. It kind of opens up the possibilities or the universe of diseases that we can start to explore. So that's super exciting.

Robin Pomeroy: That technology was called quantum simulation for drug discovery.

Number nine on the list of 10 emerging technologies. Now some of them, you can tell what they mean just by the title. And then these titles are a bit more enigmatic. So I'll just say number nine is world models.

Kimmy Bettinger: We were chatting earlier about our kids. You know I have a nine-month-old son named Hayes. And watching him learn has been amazing. I can give you an example. He doesn't know what the word gravity means, but I can watch him sitting in his high chair, looking over the edge and dropping his spoon on the floor.

Robin Pomeroy: Oh, they love that. That spoon's going down there 20 times.

Kimmy Bettinger: Luckily, we have a dog, so that helps us. But yeah, he, you know, he understands, he feels the weight of the spoon in his hand, he hears the thud when it hits the floor. He can't speak, he could never tell you what gravity is, but he already has a little model in his head around how the world works, which is really cool.

When we think about the way some of our most powerful AI learns right now, it's on descriptions of the world, text about the world and things like that. What world models do differently is they actually learn like my son, Hayes. They learn from experience, they learn from understanding how things bump into each other. And that opens up a lot of things we've been chasing for decades.

We can think about robots that can respond to situations that are ambiguous on a factory floor. We don't need to just say, you do this one precise gesture 100 times a day. The robot might not know the context that it's operating in, and it's able to do so because it has these world models that it built around.

Similarly, we can look at climate models that can truly understand the way a storm moves, factories that can learn as they run. So the gap between what AI can learn and what it can actually understand about the world is starting to close.

Robin Pomeroy: Yeah, it's quite a philosophical thing, isn't it? Can something exist without language? Well, it certainly can. In your son's case, he's discovered gravity. Babies and toddlers are figuring out the world, and they don't have words for it, but those things exist.

So my question would be, we just got used to large language models. Most people now understand more or less. Well, no one really knows how they work, but more or less, the technology is they're fed vast amounts of words and sentences, and all that data, and all of human knowledge is contained in words. But lots of human knowledge is not words. It is that I'll suddenly react. If I throw this pen at you, your hand's going to come up. Your brain isn't going through lots of words to do that.

And so bringing this real-world stuff, I'm just wondering where that data comes from. And it says here. "These models ingest data from multiple sensory channels, such as video, depth sensors, pressure readings, motion capture."

So there's lots of data. And I guess we think about electric vehicles, how they're in San Francisco. You see driverless cars all the time, which is still witchcraft for most of us in Europe. But you're seeing them literally every day on the streets, right? They must already be doing some real world sensory learning here, right?

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, so that's an interesting use case of that type of data could be really valuable as we start to think about how we build these world models.

Robin Pomeroy: So with applications for robots, but also, as you mentioned, for climate science. People can read more about that. That is number nine on the list, that's called world models.

Kimmy, we're on number 10. It's the top 10, we are on number ten.

Kimmy Bettinger: We've reached the finish line.

Robin Pomeroy: We're almost there, let's see if we can get through this one, another one I wouldn't have no idea what it means from its title, or maybe I would, lattice-based cryptography.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah OK, you mentioned I'm from San Francisco, so I will use a classic San Francisco analogy. I'll use the analogy of fog. Lattice-based cryptography is a new approach to keeping your data safe that really hides your data inside of what we can think about as a mathematical fog.

We have a huge multi-dimensional grid where we mix random noise in. And from the outside you really can't see the right answer that you're looking for. The fog obscures the right answer amid thousands of wrong answers, let's say. Even a quantum computer gets lost in this mathematical fog.

Robin Pomeroy: To go back to quantum again, that's why this is important, because we have cyber security now. We've got passwords. We've got all kinds of clever ways of stopping criminals breaking into our data, to our phones, to our computers, to our power grids, to our governments, to military sites, whatever. Everything is at risk of cyber attack, which if we're clever enough right now, we can control.

But there's a future scenario. Where someone's got a quantum computer, which has not yet been developed. And I notice in this report, "criminals can have a harvest now, decrypt later mentality," which means they can get all this decrypted data. They don't know what it means. But they'll know if they just hold it for a few years, they'll have a computer, strong enough because it will be a quantum computer, that it will be able to decrypt it. It might still be useful even in a few year's time.

So you're saying this technology could kind of future proof that protection of that data.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yep, exactly. And we're already starting to see a move towards quantum-safe encryption. And now it's just a question of whether we can move fast enough and make sure that we're doing it in a way that we can really keep sensitive data safe.

Robin Pomeroy: So also in this report is this phrase, homomorphic encryption, which if I understand it right, enables data to be shared without in some way revealing itself.

Kimmy Bettinger: So when we think about data actually being truly quantum safe, it means we have kind of a new kind of trust in how we can use that data, which is really exciting.

We can now compute on this data without needing to necessarily unlock or expose it. And so lattice-based cryptography not only is keeping us safe from this risk. But it's also moving us toward a future where we know our data is safe and we can do a lot more stuff with it.

So an example that I can share from the report is, there was a hospital that trained AI on 300,000 patient records from three different hospitals. That's really sensitive information. They were able to do it without actually revealing the underlying data. So they were able to build an AI model that could do really robust analysis around health outcomes and things without ever having to expose the data of those individual patients and it can help us move medicine forward.

So yeah, that's kind of, we talked a little bit about the risk but there's also a huge positive opportunity here.

Robin Pomeroy: That one is called lattice-based cryptography, you'll also see that to do the thing you were just referring to then, again, is a policy challenge, because if one hospital is sharing patient data with another or one country to another, using this technology, where you're not just giving them lists of data, but you're giving them encrypted data, which will not be completely decrypted by the recipient, but there'll be some way of using it, it requires standards to be put in place so that everyone's using the same standard that allows this method to work. Which sounds like a big challenge, but...

Kimmy Bettinger: It is. I will say that we're starting to see some of the national standard setting bodies already start to establish this as a foundation.

So for example, in the United States, lattice-based cryptography is kind of the core to the big quantum safe computing standards that have been put in place. So we are starting to some kind of convergence around this as the way forward.

Robin Pomeroy: Lattice-based cryptography is number 10, brings us to the end of the top 10 emerging technologies 2026.

Doing this work, Kimmy, was there any kind of takeaway for you on the way some of this technology is taking us?

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, it is interesting every year to zoom out and look at the cohort of 10 and say, you know, do we see any signals around where the frontier might be heading? And we've started to tease out a few of the trends that I've noticed already.

The first is that some of these technologies are becoming much more personal. We talked about the personalised cancer vaccines and things like that. Where we're really starting to think instead of like a population average, we're moving towards technologies that are addressing an individual, a really specific need.

The second that we also touched on a little bit is this idea of more local lithium that can be produced near where batteries are actually made, let's say, or protein that can come from a bioreactor in a city that doesn't have a farm. Everything to great energy. Energy that can really be balanced at the neighbourhood level.

So that relationship between kind of place and production is changing a little bit. And that's maybe a really good thing for our supply chains and things.

Robin Pomeroy: And that, also, is probably going to have potential impacts on the global economy as well. We talked about the pharmaceuticals industry and the energy industry. These are really hard to predict, but we'll see over the next five years what happens. Any other themes that hit you during making this report?

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, yeah, the one other thing that stood out to me is there's this thread of actually doing more with less, you know, cooling without electricity, for example. There's a few technologies that really start to cluster about kind of finding ways that we can get similar results without adding additional strain on our planet. I think that's a really interesting through line here as well.

Robin Pomeroy: And I mentioned earlier that you also kind of honestly address some of the drawbacks or challenges here. Are there some that stood out to you where, yeah, this could be great in some ways, but also.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, I will say the one that has stayed with me the most is actually precision fermentation.

The challenge of feeding 9 billion is a massive one, and it will require kind of all hands on deck. But the reason it stands out to me is because my husband's a cattle rancher, and he comes from a family of generations of cattle ranchers. And so while precision fermentation can really offer a new way to meet our needs and produce foods and things. At the same time, we run the risk of pulling that production away from the families, the economies that have been doing that for generations or longer.

Robin Pomeroy: And in less developed countries, most people are still working in agriculture as well. And so that has to be taken into consideration. Things like this are addressed in the report.

I was going to ask you for your favourite. I have a feeling you're going to decline and just say, that one is the one that resonates with you most.

Kimmy Bettinger: Yeah, yeah. I don't have a favourite. It's impossible to pick a favourite the reason I love getting the chance to work with experts and develop this report is because I get to learn across a huge breadth of topics and really see something that could fundamentally change the world. It is impossible to have a favourite when that's the scope.

Robin Pomeroy: They're not my children, I can pick a favourite.

Kimmy Bettinger: Okay, what's yours?

Robin Pomeroy: You only have one child, so that's your favourite for now. Yeah, yeah.

Kimmy Bettinger: What's yours?

Robin Pomeroy: It's a tight-run thing. So people encourage you, they'll be linking the show notes, go and get this report, Top 10 Emerging Technologies and you can pick your favourite.

I reckon it was, I was thinking the everything to green energy, love that because I just love the idea because that's so personal. If you, you know, can manage your own electricity, feed it into the grid, take it off the grid. You know it just seems a clever way of overcoming some of those problems of the energy transition of renewable energies. Also incidentally, talking of drawbacks, the point is made quite clearly there, it's great if you own a house and you own a car, you might really, this might in the next five years might be really great for you. What if you don't own a home or a car and you're renting, maybe your landlord's burning money off this but maybe not necessarily you. So I do like this report really addresses those real-world problems.

So that one, which was number one, everything to grid energy, actually is pipped to the post. I'm going to say my favourite of these has to be personalised mRNA cancer vaccines. The idea that, and because we've all seen it, I know at least one person springs to mind who that was not available, and it could be available in the next five years to someone ending up in that situation again. A personalised cure for cancer. I mean, come on. So I'll take that one.

Robin Pomeroy: Before I let you go, Kimmy, you said this report's been going for 14 years. People can look back and find them. They can also find the last five or six years on Radio Davos. It must have changed over the years the way innovation happens.

Kimmy Bettinger: Really interesting. One of the signals that was very clear to us this year is that the way scientific discovery happens is fundamentally changing with AI. We've all talked about, oh, it can compress timelines and things, but I actually think it's bigger than that.

What we're seeing is science traditionally works on the come up with an hypothesis, run an experiment on it, learn from it, try another experiment. But actually, with AI, what we're able to do is do a bit of experimentation pre-hypothesis, we're able to ask really, really broad open questions and develop our hypothesis from that so that then typically the experiment phase becomes a bit more of a validation stage. So, it really shifts the way science is happening.

As we think about, okay, the next 14 years of this report, what does that mean? What might innovation look like? We're starting to consider where we'll see resource going in science. For us, maybe that's more around the models, the compute, the talent to do this type of work. As we think about where science happens and how science happens, who's able to deliver on that? Maybe that is a bit more of the private sector or how can academia build into that. So I think we'll start to see some big shifts in the landscape there as well.

Robin Pomeroy: So things are speeding up, but also there's fundamental changes to how innovation is even dreamt up in the first place.

Kimmy Bettinger, thanks so much for joining us on Radio Davos.

Kimmy Bettinger: Thank you, it's been a pleasure to spend this hour with you, Robin.

Robin Pomeroy: Please follow Radio Davos wherever you get podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts, where you can also find our two other weekly podcasts, Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues.

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Radio Davos will be back next week but from me, goodbye.