The number of medical and health science articles published during the COVID-19 pandemic years 2020–2022 was 9% higher than trend-based predictions, reflecting accelerated research and technological progress across many areas of biomedical science.

Innovations unleashed by the pandemic for combatting communicable diseases—including in vaccine, monoclonal antibody, and antimicrobial development, in mathematical modeling, and in multisectoral, international collaboration—must be leveraged to further improve patient care and public health.

The pandemic underlined the importance of advancing personalized/precision medicine, taking individual, environmental, and social determinants of health into account; advanced omics-based technologies enabled by systems biology, advanced computational analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and new clinical trial designs, offer unprecedented opportunities.

The pandemic accelerated digital medicine: telehealth and digital therapeutics are driving improvements both in clinical care and health systems resilience.

Achieving this future of medicine requires new forms interdisciplinarity that integrate knowledge and skills across biomedical science, healthcare, public health, regulation, policy, economics, social science, and more—supported by radical reform of research funding and policies to ensure equitable access to medical innovation across populations and countries.