(Yicai) June 24 -- The World Economic Forum’s latest annual Top 10 Emerging Technologies report puts the spotlight on green tech that improves resource efficiency and on personalized medicine.

The report, published yesterday during the WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, China, “identifies the scientific advances approaching the moment when they are ready to change the world,” according to the Geneva-based organization’s website.

The 2026 edition looks at everything-to-grid energy, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling materials, forever chemicals destruction, precision fermentation, exosome drug delivery, personalized mRNA cancer vaccines, quantum simulation for drug discovery, world models, and lattice-based cryptography.

Technologies are increasingly being tailored to individual patients or specific use cases, while many solutions are also becoming more decentralized, producing food, energy, and raw materials closer to where they are consumed and achieving greater output with fewer resources, according to the report.

Everything-to-grid energy systems, for instance, can link distributed assets such as electric vehicles, factories, and data centers, enabling power stored during idle periods to be fed back into the grid when demand spikes.

During a peak demand event in California in 2024, a network of more than 16,000 solar-powered households collectively supplied 51 megawatts of electricity to the grid, exceeding the output of multiple conventional fossil-fuel power plants, the report said.

Other green tech highlighted include passive radiative cooling materials, which can reflect as much as 95 percent of incoming sunlight to cool building surfaces without external energy input. Direct lithium extraction technologies can recover lithium, used in battery production, from geothermal brines, oilfield wastewater, and recycled materials.

The destruction of forever chemicals involves using ultra-high temperature, electric current, or ultraviolet radiation to completely destroy per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are highly resistant to natural degradation.

In the field of life sciences, personalized mRNA cancer therapy involve sequencing a patient’s tumor to identify its unique genetic mutations, then designing a customized jab. A melanoma clinical trial cited in the report found the approach reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 40 percent to 50 percent.

Other life science technologies covered in the report are also rooted in precision medicine. Exosome-based drug delivery is used to improve the precision and effectiveness of targeted therapies, while quantum simulation for drug discovery applies quantum computing to improve the success rate of identifying viable drug candidates.

This year marks the 14th edition of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies report. It aims to identify breakthrough technologies that can reshape the economic and social landscape in the next three to five years, and calls on decision-makers to promote their rollout.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Tom Litting