British scientists are working on a system which should allow the elderly to buy body parts “off the shelf” and even regenerate their own damaged joints and hearts. As well as new harder wearing artificial hip and knee joints, their ultimate ambition is to fix up the body with customised replacement parts grown to order. They have already carried out human trials on heart valves which are still working four years after they were transplanted.
Archive for the 'Health/Bio-Tech' Category
In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it.
Just 23 characters long, his message, "using EEG to send tweet," demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which "locked-in" patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools.
View and download a video of Wilson using the brain-computer interface to post to Twitter at http://nitrolab.engr.wisc.edu/media/P3Twitter.mov
By combining nanoparticles with a scorpion venom compound already being investigated for treating brain cancer, University of Washington researchers
found they could cut the spread of cancerous cells by 98 percent, compared to 45 percent for the scorpion venom alone.
"People talk about the treatment being more effective with nanoparticles but they don’t know how much, maybe 5 percent or 10 percent," said Miqin Zhang, professor of materials science and engineering. "This was quite a surprise to us." She is lead author of a study recently published in the journal Small.
EurekAlert!Biologists have discovered a molecular circuit breaker that controls a zebrafish’s remarkable ability to regrow missing fins, according to a new study from Duke University Medical Center.
Tiny wonders of the aquarium world, zebrafish can regenerate organs and tissues, including hearts, eye parts and fins. When a fin is lost, the fish regenerates a perfect copy in two weeks by orchestrating the growth of many tissue types, including bone, nerves, blood vessels, connective tissue and skin.
Scientists hope that understanding how zebrafish repair themselves will lead to new treatments for human conditions caused by damaged tissue, such as heart failure, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.
Scores of infectious diseases have emerged to threaten humans in the past decades as viruses leap the species barrier from wild animals and bacteria mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains, scientists reported on Wednesday.
Presenting the first-ever map of “hotspots” of new infectious diseases, they predict that the next pandemic is likeliest to come out of poor tropical countries, where burgeoning human populations come into contact with wildlife.
A three-year investigation led by four major institutions tracked 335 incidents since 1940 when a new infectious disease emerged.
The category includes HIV/AIDS, which has slain or infected more than 65 million people around the world, and outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H5N1 bird flu, which have cost tens of billions of dollars to contain.
Yahoo via Posthuman Blues
A new technique that combines bone marrow removal and injection of a hormone helps promote rapid formation of new bone at targeted locations in the body, it was reported by Yale School of Medicine recently in Tissue Engineering.
“This could radically change the way patients are currently treated for weakened or fractured hips, vertebrae and acute traumatic long bone fractures,” said senior author Agnès Vignery, associate professor of orthopedics.
She said currently available treatment requires surgery and artificial materials and often results in imperfect outcomes. “The ideal approach would be to create new bone where it is needed and at a faster rate,” Vignery said.
A South Korean biotech company has announced it will, for the first time ever, commercially clone a pet dog, according to reports coming out of the country.
RNL Bio said last week that it received an order from Californian Bernann McKunney, to clone her deceased pet pitbull, Booger, to the tune of $150,000. Booger died in 2005, but not before McKinney had tissue from his ear preserved.
The Korean company told the BBC that the cloning will take place at Seoul National University (SNU), where the first dog, Afghan hound Snuppy, was successfully cloned as a proof of concept in 2005. The SNU team that will recreate Booger is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, who was a colleague of Hwang Woo-suk, the disgraced Korean stem cell scientist who admitted fabricating data on human embryonic stem cell lines in 2006. Hwang’s dog cloning work, however, was determined to be legitimate, and the SNU team went on, after Hwang’s departure from the university, to successfully clone wolves.
An experimental study that treats PTSD veterans with the drug MDMA could make life after war a lot more livable.
“We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need,” said House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called “Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs,” held in December 2007. “Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off.”
Filner’s choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that’s a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a “rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions,” to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.
Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine—otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy—to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the ‘80s and ‘90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications—that is, illegality—and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.
“We’re looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere,” he explained by phone.
Scientists have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.
It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals.
By attaching a millimeter-sized camera robot to a tether, scientists have designed a way to allow individuals with non-medical backgrounds to perform minimally invasive surgery in almost any location. Unlike room-size and expensive surgical robots, mini in vivo robots are inexpensive and mobile enough to support emergency surgeries almost anywhere, from the battlefield to outer space.
The University of Nebraska researchers hope that the inexpensive version of the da Vinci surgical robot system will make the advantages of robotic-assisted surgery more widely available, and open the doors for telesurgeries that were previously impossible. In a recent study, the team evaluated the ease of use and time required to perform simple abdominal surgeries with the in vivo camera robots. Their results are published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.
“A new area of surgical robotics focuses on placing robots entirely inside the patient,” wrote Mark Rentschler et al. in their study. “In vivo robots are small, inexpensive, and easily transported, making it more likely that this technology can be more widely adopted. . . . The use of these robots can potentially reduce patient trauma in traditional medical centers, while the size of the robots makes them ideal for transportation to and use in remote or harsh environments.”
Life is everywhere in the upper Amazon wilderness. Life that creeps, life that crawls, life that slithers, sprouts, burrows, scurries and slinks—and dies. The dank odors of alternating rot and genesis rise from the mulching forest floor. My Deet-fortified insect spray battles swarms of blood-mad mosquitoes to a draw. The air is fat with syrupy humidity, and I am sweating like an icicle in the sun.
Nature is on fast-forward here. Trees—palms, laurels, kapoks, mahoganies, bamboos, acacias, figs, balsas, cedars—jostle each other in the search for a share of the sunlight; they grow to enormous heights and spread their foliage like a green umbrella at the top. Lianas, tropical climbing plants, wind themselves like boa constrictors around the tree trunks and arch themselves in great loops as they, too, struggle upward for a glimpse of light. The trees become parasites, and giant orchids seed themselves in branches 60 feet from the ground. The general effect is of a an impenetrable fecund, living wall.
Amid this vast assortment of life, creatures use stunts and flim-flam to befuddle or repel predators, lure prey, seduce mates and gobble food. Caterpillars masquerade as snakes, plants imitate the smell of rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators, and trees rely on fish to distribute their seeds when the rivers flood.
It’s a jungle out here.
Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient’s upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.
Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.
“There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn’t use the patient’s own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue,” said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.
Reuters via Boing Boing
A new study finds that the development of bullous lung disease occurs in marijuana smokers approximately 20 years earlier than tobacco smokers.
A condition often caused by exposure to toxic chemicals or long-term exposure to tobacco smoke, bullous lung disease (also known as bullae) is a condition where air trapped in the lungs causes obstruction to breathing and eventual destruction of the lungs.
At present, about 10% of young adults and 1% of the adult population smoke marijuana regularly. Researchers find that the mean age of marijuana-smoking patients with lung problems was 41, as opposed to the average age of 65 years for tobacco-smoking patients.
The study “Bullous Lung Disease due to Marijuana” also finds that the bullous lung disease can easily go undetected as patients suffering from the disease may show normal chest X-rays and lung functions. High-resolution CT scans revealed severe asymmetrical, variably sized bullae in the patients studied. However, chest X-rays and lung functions were normal in half of them.
A new study published in the journal Current Biology by researchers of the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Centre Suisse des Recherches Scientifiques (Ivory Coast) confirms the disease threat, finding the first direct evidence of virus transmission from humans to wild apes. The study also showed however that research and tourism projects strongly suppressed the poaching of chimpanzees. This protective effect outweighed the substantial chimpanzee mortality caused by human disease introduction.
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