A Singapore-developed technology used in Hewlett-Packard’s patented process for its inkjet cartridges, could soon be used in skin patches to administer drugs.

The locally-developed microneedle technology is used in Hewlett-Packard’s patented process for its inkjet cartridges, could soon be used in transdermal patches to deliver time-controlled release of drugs to patients.

HP announced Tuesday that it will license its microneedle technology to Crospon, an Ireland-based medical device maker, to develop and manufacture drug-laden skin patches for the healthcare market.

In a phone interview with ZDNet Asia, Crospon CEO John O’Dea said that the skin patch is akin to “a very small infusion pump”. Still at the prototype stage, the patch will likely be 25 mm square in size and 3 mm thick. It will incorporate an array of microneedles that are between 75 and 100 microns, which will penetrate the top dry layer of the skin, also known as the stratum corneum.

A 5-year-old British girl who is the youngest person to ever receive a double lung transplant is flourishing nine months after the operation. Suffering from cystic fibrosis since she was only three months old, Mariam Imran’s health had been deteriorating until her record-setting surgery at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Daily Mail said Wednesday. Now her parents, who were once told their daughter had only months to live, are happy to watch Mariam play just like any other child.

“When you look at her you’d never think that she’s recently had a double lung transplant,” Mariam’s mother, Faaiza Dar, said. “The only word to describe everything is ‘wow.’”

The 25-year-old also thanked the family who agreed to donate their own loved one’s lungs to help a complete stranger.

“I can’t imagine what it was like for the family who donated the lungs,” Dar told the British newspaper. “It must have been a very hard decision but I want to say a massive thank you.”

Based on previous reports that anthocyanidins, a group of naturally occurring compounds widely available in fruits and vegetables as well as red wine, have chemopreventive properties, Dr. Yin and his collaborators studied the effects and the mechanisms of the most common type of a naturally modified anthocyanidin, known as cyanidin-3-rutinoside, or C-3-R, which was extracted and purified from black raspberries, in several leukemia and lymphoma cell lines.

They found that C-3-R caused about 50 percent of a human leukemia cell line known as HL-60 to undergo programmed cell death, or apoptosis, within about 18 hours of treatment at low doses. When they more than doubled the concentration of C-3-R, virtually all of the leukemia cells became apoptotic and died. C-3-R also induced apoptosis in other human leukemia and lymphoma cell lines.

When the investigators studied the mechanism of cell death in the leukemia cells, they found that C-3-R induced the accumulation of peroxides, a highly reactive form of oxygen, which, in turn, activated a mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathway. Mitochondria are specialized structures located within all cells in the body that contain enzymes needed by the cell to metabolize foodstuffs into energy sources. In contrast, when the researchers treated normal human blood cells with C-3-R, they did not find any increased accumulation of reactive oxygen species and there were no apparent toxic effects on these cells.

biosingularity

Researchers are adding to the list of cancer types for which pomegranates seem to halt growth. A recent study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison using a mouse model shows that consuming pomegranates could potentially help reduce the growth and spread of lung cancer cells or even prevent lung cancer from developing.

In a recent issue of Cancer Research, researchers led by Hasan Mukhtar, co-leader of the Cancer Chemoprevention Program of the University of Wisconsin Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center, demonstrate that drinking pomegranate fruit extract helps slow the growth of lung cancer in mice.

“Pomegranate fruit continues to show great promise,” says Mukhtar, professor of dermatology at the School of Medicine and Public Health and a member of the Carbone Cancer Center. “We have earlier shown that pomegranate fruit contains very powerful skin and prostate cancer-fighting agents. These recent findings expand the possible health benefits of the fruit to the leading cause of cancer death in the country and worldwide: lung cancer.”

biosingularity

Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn’t lost blood. All that’s happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of “clinical death”—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller “How We Die,” the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn’t be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that “astounding” discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine’s newest frontiers: treating the dead.

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