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Nanotechnology World: An Essential Step toward Printing Living TissuesA new bioprinting method developed at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) creates intricately patterned 3D tissue constructs with multiple types of cells and tiny blood vessels.
The work represents a major step toward a longstanding goal of tissue engineers: creating human tissue constructs realistic enough to test drug safety and effectiveness.
The method also represents an early but important step toward building fully functional replacements for injured or diseased tissue that can be designed from CAT scan data using computer-aided design (CAD), printed in 3D at the push of a button, and used by surgeons to repair or replace damaged tissue.
An Essential Step toward Printing Living Tissues
Nanotechnology World: An Essential Step toward Printing Living TissuesA new bioprinting method developed at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) creates intricately patterned 3D tissue constructs with multiple types of cells and tiny blood vessels.
The work represents a major step toward a longstanding goal of tissue engineers: creating human tissue constructs realistic enough to test drug safety and effectiveness.
The method also represents an early but important step toward building fully functional replacements for injured or diseased tissue that can be designed from CAT scan data using computer-aided design (CAD), printed in 3D at the push of a button, and used by surgeons to repair or replace damaged tissue.
An Essential Step toward Printing Living Tissues
Nanotechnology World: An Essential Step toward Printing Living TissuesA new bioprinting method developed at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) creates intricately patterned 3D tissue constructs with multiple types of cells and tiny blood vessels.
The work represents a major step toward a longstanding goal of tissue engineers: creating human tissue constructs realistic enough to test drug safety and effectiveness.
The method also represents an early but important step toward building fully functional replacements for injured or diseased tissue that can be designed from CAT scan data using computer-aided design (CAD), printed in 3D at the push of a button, and used by surgeons to repair or replace damaged tissue.
yeah, cause all we need now is designer flu out there.
On the other hand we will be able to do many things that improves life.Today, an international team of researchers reported the discovery of a 1,000 year-old disease-causing bacteria in the dental calculus of teeth collected from a German Medieval population that exhibits similarities to inflammatory disease-causing bacteria in humans today. The scientific results seem unlikely in light of modern hygiene and dental health practices.
Among the international team of scientists was Christina Warinner, a research associate in the Molecular Anthropologies Laboratories, Oklahoma University College of Arts and Sciences. Warinner assembled the international team of experts using the most advanced technology available to build a detailed picture of people from the Medieval period by extracting DNA from samples of the dental calculus. Although the samples were small, dental calculus has a thousand times more DNA than bone. Warinner and her team also inspected the protein in the samples for a more detailed look.
As people age, they become less able to bounce back from injuries — a problem that adds risk to many of common medical procedures the elderly face. At the same time, stem cells’ greatest promise is to allow people to produce new, healthy tissue to recover from illness or injury. But because stem cell therapies remain cutting edge, they have largely been used to target life-threatening problems such as heart failure.
Not everyone's blood clots at the same rate. While that might seem like simply an interesting bit of trivia, it's anything but trivial to doctors performing operations or emergency procedures, who need to know what might be required in the way of transfusions or anticoagulant drugs. Now, an optical device can provide them with that information within minutes.
Currently, in order to measure its clotting properties, patients' blood must be subjected to a series of lab tests that can take hours to perform, that require relatively large amounts of blood, or that involve large, expensive machines. The new device, developed by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital, gets much quicker, less costly results, it's about the size of a Kleenex box, and it only requires a few drops.
It utilizes a process known as laser speckle rheology, in which a laser is shined into the liquid, and the patterns of the reflected light are analyzed. In the case of unclotted blood, the freely-moving cells and platelets cause the pattern to fluctuate rapidly. As the cells and platelets start to join and the blood starts to coagulate, however
A team led by Jean-François Côté, researcher at the IRCM, identified a ''conductor'' in the development of muscle tissue. The discovery, published online yesterday by the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could have an important impact on the treatment of muscular diseases such as myopathies and muscular dystrophies.
"For several years, we have been studying myogenesis, a process by which muscles are formed during embryonic development," says Jean-François Côté, PhD, Director of the Cytoskeletal Organization and Cell Migration research unit at the IRCM. "During the last step of this process, muscle cells called myoblasts align and fuse together to form muscle fibers."
The fusion of myoblasts is a critical step in the formation of embryonic muscle fibers as it determines muscle size, among other things. This process is also important in adult life because muscle stem cells fuse with existing fibers to achieve muscle growth and help regenerate damaged muscles. However, until now, fusion remained a poorly understood step within the scientific community.
If you’ve seen the movie Gattaca, you might understand the implications of eugenics, or genetically altering DNA to create a more perfect human. The film was science fiction way back in 1997, but since then, we’ve made a lot of progress in understanding our genetic code, making this sort of society (at least theoretically) possible. Both the US and UK governments are now considering allowing the genetic modification of embryos to battle mitochondrial diseases by mixing in a third parent’s mitochondrial DNA.
Every year, the flu kills thousands of Americans, and puts over 100,000 in hospitals. The best way to combat it is with an annual flu shot, administered via hypodermic needle (ouch) by a medical professional. But what would happen if vaccinations were simpler? What if there was a patch you could apply at home that would do exactly the same thing as those painful shots? A recent study done by Georgia Tech researchers suggests that not only would using a patch be more cost-effective and easier for everyone involved, but that more people would receive vaccinations if a patch were available.
With 9 million new cases and 2 million deaths annually, Tuberculosis is the second most prevalent and deadliest infectious disease worldwide. As an airborne disease, it spreads easily and is very contagious. Quick detection and identification is the key to success in preventing the spread of the disease.
.As climate change leads to rapidly melting permafrost in the Russian tundra, a recent find has scientists worried that trouble may be lurking below. A 30,000 year old virus of unprecedented size has been found and reactivated.
The virus, dubbed Pithovirus Sibericum, appears to affect amoebas and not human or mouse cells. Named after the Greek word, "pithos," meaning a large earthenware jar, it was discovered by a group of researchers from Aix-Marseille University.
The virus, which is so large it can be seen under an optical microscope, was found in a 98-foot-deep sample of permafrost near the East Siberia Sea, where the average annual temperature is 7 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Agence France-Presse
Genomics pioneer Craig Venter has launched a new company that aims to create the world's largest human-genome sequencing operation for tackling aging-related ailments from Alzheimer's to heart disease.
Backed by an initial $70 million in funding, the California-based company says it will match patients' genetic data to individual health records in a far more detailed way than has been attempted before.
n asthma drug accelerates the process of desensitizing patients with food allergies to several foods at the same time, a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford shows.
Radical treatment helps patients' defences against virus by replacing immune cells with genetically modified versions
A radical gene therapy to combat HIV using genetically modified cells that are resistant to the virus has been declared a success by scientists following the first clinical trial.
The treatment, which has never been tested on humans before, raised patients' defences against HIV by replacing some of their natural immune cells with GM versions.
Tests on people enrolled in the trial found that the disease-resistant cells multiplied in their bodies.
Health monitoring start-up Azoi has announced the availability of a significant product in the form of the Wello, a thin lightweight smartphone case embedded with sensors that measures blood pressure, electrocardiography (ECG), heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature, and lung functions to a high level of accuracy. The US$199 Wello case will be initially available for iPhone 4S, 5 and 5S, but for those who don’t have one of those phones, the case will still work with any IOS or android device which has Bluetooth LE functionality – you just won’t be able to use the case on your phone.
Using an inexpensive 3-D printer, biomedical engineers have developed a custom-fitted, implantable device with embedded sensors that could transform treatment and prediction of cardiac disorders.
An international team of biomedical engineers and materials scientists have created a 3-D elastic membrane made of a soft, flexible, silicon material, precisely shaped to match the heart's epicardium (its outer layer). Current technology is two-dimensional and cannot cover the full surface of the epicardium or maintain reliable contact for continual use without sutures or adhesives.
Tiny sensors can be printed onto this membrane that precisely measure temperature, mechanical strain and pH level, among other markers, or deliver a pulse of electricity in cases of arrhythmia. These sensors could assist physicians with determining the health of the heart, deliver treatment or predict an impending heart attack before a patient exhibits any physical signs.
"Each heart is a different shape, and current devices are one-size-fits-all and don't at all conform to the geometry of a patient's heart," says Professor Igor Efimov, at Washington University in St. Louis. "With this application, we image the patient's heart through MRI or CT scan, then computationally extract the image to build a 3-D model that we can print on a 3-D printer. We then mold the shape of the membrane that will constitute the base of the device deployed on the surface of the heart."
A European project coordinated by Ikerlan and CIC microGUNE is developing a James Bond-style automated laboratory called "LABoratory skin patches and smart cards based ON FOILs and compatible with a smartphone" (LABONFOIL). Using lab-on-a-chip technology and smart patches to detect a wide variety of substances and diagnose diseases, the goal of the project is to create a cheap, portable laboratory that can interact with smart devices.
Alzheimer's disease represents the most common form of dementia, with the early stages of the disease generally characterized with short term memory loss and learning difficulties that increase in severity as the patient progresses in age. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, California, have discovered that with regular treatments of the antioxidant fisetin, they were able to prevent memory loss in mice with genetic mutations linked to Alzheimer's.
Whilst the cause and progression of Alzheimer's are not well understood, current theories link the existence of the disease to amyloid plaques and tangles in the brain. There is currently no cure or treatment to either eradicate or halt the advance of the disease, however the research carried out by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a good example of how scientists are instead attempting to combat the symptoms of the debilitating disease.
A group of medical researchers working at Georgetown University, the University of Rochester and UC-Irvine have developed a blood test which predicts with 90 percent accuracy if an individual will develop Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) within three years. The test, which looks for a set of ten lipid markers, will allow treatments to be sought that may be effective during this early, asymptomatic stage of the disease.
Alzheimer's disease (memory-related MCI is thought to consist of early Alzheimer's symptoms) is a scourge ravishing the elderly among us, with 35 million currently afflicted worldwide, a number that is expected to grow to 115 million by mid-century. Alzheimer's is universally fatal, with life expectancy of about seven years after diagnosis. Diagnosis is generally indirect, largely based on symptoms and ruling out other causes of dementia.
In end-stage lung disease, transplantation is sometimes the only viable therapeutic option, but organ availability is limited and rejection presents an additional challenge. Innovative research efforts in the field of tissue regeneration, including pioneering discoveries by University of Vermont Professor of Medicine Daniel Weiss, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues, hold promise for this population, which includes an estimated 12.7 million people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
In the past year alone, Weiss and colleagues published four articles in Biomaterials, the leading bioengineering journal, as well as two March 2014 articles by first author Darcy Wagner, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow working in Weiss' lab, reporting their development of new methods and techniques for engineering lungs for patients with COPD and pulmonary fibrosis.
Weiss and his team's work focuses on lung tissue bioengineering, which involves the use of a scaffold -- or framework -- of lungs from human cadavers to engineer new lungs for patients with end-stage disease. Their studies have examined multiple perspectives on the process of stripping the cellular material from these lungs -- called decellularizing -- and replacing it with stem cells (recellularization), in an effort to grow new, healthy lungs for transplantation.
