Dubai, UAE — A new generation of technologies spanning healthcare, energy, manufacturing, artificial intelligence and environmental remediation is approaching a critical stage where laboratory breakthroughs are beginning to translate into commercial and societal applications, according to the World Economic Forum’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies Report 2026.
Produced with scientific publisher Frontiers and developed alongside the Dubai Future Foundation, the report identifies 10 technologies that it says are likely to achieve significant real-world impact within the next three to five years.
The technologies range from energy systems that allow buildings and vehicles to supply electricity back to the grid, to personalised cancer vaccines, advanced drug-discovery tools and technologies capable of destroying so-called “forever chemicals” that persist in the environment.
The report arrives at what its authors describe as a period of heightened uncertainty and growing focus on resilience. Rather than identifying distant scientific possibilities, it concentrates on technologies approaching what the Forum calls a commercial and societal inflection point.
From centralised systems to distributed networks
A recurring theme across the technologies is the possibility that production, energy generation and critical services could become less dependent on geography and large centralised infrastructure.
Among the technologies identified are everything-to-grid energy systems, direct lithium extraction and precision fermentation.
Everything-to-grid systems allow buildings, vehicles, factories and data centres to act not only as energy consumers but also as suppliers, returning stored electricity to power networks when required.
Direct lithium extraction technologies are designed to recover lithium from brines in hours rather than months while using less land and water than conventional methods.
Precision fermentation uses engineered microorganisms to produce proteins, ingredients and compounds that traditionally depended on agriculture or resource-intensive manufacturing.
The report says precision fermentation is already moving beyond the laboratory. Companies are producing whey proteins, egg proteins and other ingredients using microbial hosts cultivated in fermentation tanks.
Perfect Day supplies fermentation-derived whey protein to U.S. food brands and is expanding production into India, while Nestlé and other companies have begun introducing fermentation-derived proteins into commercial products.
According to the report, precision fermentation could eventually shift food production from a question of agricultural geography to one of infrastructure, energy availability and bioprocessing capacity.
The technology is also being applied to cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and chemical manufacturing.
At the same time, the report notes that financing, regulation, intellectual property and manufacturing capacity will influence how rapidly the technology scales.
Healthcare technologies gain momentum
Healthcare accounts for several of the technologies highlighted in this year’s report, reflecting advances in genomics, computation, biological engineering and targeted therapies.
One of the most closely watched developments is personalised messenger RNA cancer vaccines.
Unlike conventional drugs, personalised cancer vaccines are designed around the genetic characteristics of an individual patient’s tumour.
Doctors sequence tumour mutations, identify specific antigens associated with cancer cells and then create an mRNA vaccine intended to train the immune system to recognise those markers.
The report says advances in genomics and the rapid expansion of mRNA manufacturing infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated development of the technology.
It cites a $200 million public-private partnership announced by the U.S. National Cancer Institute in March 2026 to support further trials.
Early studies highlighted in the report include research into pancreatic cancer and melanoma.
In pancreatic cancer, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center reported encouraging results among patients whose immune systems responded to personalised vaccine treatment.
For melanoma, a multi-centre trial in the United States and Europe found that combining a personalised vaccine with immunotherapy reduced the risk of recurrence or death compared with immunotherapy alone.
The report says personalised vaccines could create a new model of pharmaceutical production, where medicines are designed and manufactured for individual patients rather than mass-produced in identical doses.
However, it also notes challenges including cost, regulatory approval, manufacturing logistics and equitable access.
Delivering medicines with the body’s own couriers
Another healthcare technology highlighted in the report is exosome drug delivery.
Exosomes are naturally occurring particles produced by cells that transport proteins, RNA and other biological material throughout the body.
Researchers are increasingly exploring their use as delivery vehicles for therapies.
According to the report, exosomes can survive in the bloodstream, cross biological barriers and deliver therapeutic payloads into cells while carrying molecular signatures recognised by the body.
Advances in production systems and purification techniques have increased manufacturing yields and enabled clinical-scale production.
More than 200 clinical trials involving exosome-based approaches have been launched since 2022 across cancer, neurological disorders and the long-term effects of COVID-19, the report says.
Among the examples cited is a phase-one pancreatic cancer trial at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in which engineered exosomes targeted mutations that had resisted previous treatments.
Researchers have also demonstrated the ability of exosomes carrying gene-editing tools to cross the blood-brain barrier and enter neurons without triggering an immune response.
The report says such advances could eventually expand treatment options for neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and glioblastoma.
At present, however, no exosome-based therapy has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and manufacturing consistency remains a challenge.
Quantum computing enters drug discovery
The report also identifies quantum simulation for drug discovery as a technology approaching wider practical use.
Traditional computers often simplify molecular interactions because of their complexity.
Quantum simulation seeks to model molecular behaviour using the same physical principles governing atoms and molecules themselves.
The report says improvements in error correction and hybrid architectures that combine quantum and classical computing have made the technology increasingly relevant to pharmaceutical research.
According to the report, the quantum drug discovery market has roughly doubled in value over the past five years.
Examples cited include a 2025 collaboration between IBM and Moderna that completed what the report describes as the largest protein-folding and mRNA simulation run on a quantum computer to date.
French companies Pasqal and Qubit Pharmaceuticals are also pursuing small-molecule drug discovery using neutral-atom quantum computing systems.
The report says quantum simulation could help researchers investigate diseases that were previously considered too complex or uncertain to pursue economically.
Addressing persistent environmental challenges
Several technologies in the report focus on environmental challenges that have historically proven difficult to address.
Among them is PFAS destruction.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are synthetic chemicals used in industrial and consumer products because they resist heat, water and chemical degradation.
Those same characteristics have made them difficult to eliminate once released into the environment.
Scientists have detected PFAS in Arctic snow, global rainfall and human blood samples.
The report highlights several emerging methods designed to break the carbon-fluorine bond that allows PFAS to persist.
These include supercritical water treatment, electrochemical destruction and UV-driven catalytic approaches.
Commercial deployment is beginning to emerge.
A facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been continuously destroying PFAS from landfill runoff since 2023, while Daikin Industries has completed a large-scale field trial processing more than 170,000 gallons of industrial wastewater using UV photochemical destruction.
The report says some systems are approaching destruction efficiencies of 99% for high-concentration waste streams.
According to the report, wider deployment will depend on regulation, verification standards and liability frameworks that recognise destruction rather than containment alone.
Artificial intelligence expands beyond language
Artificial intelligence appears throughout the report, but one of the technologies highlighted directly is the emergence of so-called world models.
Unlike conventional large language models trained primarily on text, world models are designed to learn how physical environments behave using multiple sources of sensory information.
The systems combine inputs such as video, depth sensors, motion capture and pressure readings into a shared representation of the physical world.
The report links recent advances to the availability of large datasets generated through robotics, industrial systems and autonomous vehicles, alongside architectural developments such as Yann LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture.
NVIDIA’s Cosmos platform, introduced in 2025 and trained on 20 million hours of physical-world data, is cited as an example of early deployment.
The report says robots trained using such approaches can generalise to situations they have not previously encountered because they rely on an internal understanding of physical behaviour rather than memorised scenarios.
Researchers are also applying world-model concepts to climate simulation and scientific discovery.
A broader shift in innovation
Beyond the individual technologies, the report identifies broader patterns emerging across innovation.
According to the World Economic Forum, many technologies are becoming more personalised, more distributed and more resource-efficient.
Technologies such as personalised cancer vaccines and exosome drug delivery are designed around individual biological characteristics.
Precision fermentation and distributed energy systems point toward production occurring closer to where goods and services are needed.
PFAS destruction and passive radiative cooling illustrate efforts to achieve environmental goals using fewer resources.
Stephan Mergenthaler, managing director of the World Economic Forum, said the technologies collectively reveal changing patterns across energy, medicine and manufacturing.
The report also argues that infrastructure, regulation, manufacturing capability, investment and public trust will play decisive roles in determining whether emerging technologies achieve broad societal impact.
Frederick Fenter, chief executive editor of Frontiers, said identifying technologies approaching a true inflection point requires access to evidence and expertise, while open science remains important for accelerating discovery and improving transparency.
The report, now in its 14th edition, was developed through a process that combined AI-assisted analysis of scientific literature, investment and ecosystem trends, expert consultations and advisory council review.
The World Economic Forum says the technologies were selected because they are expected to scale within five years and deliver broad societal benefits, though the extent of their impact will depend on decisions made around infrastructure, governance, investment and adoption over the coming years.
