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In 2012 quadriplegic Jan Scheuermann had two electrode arrays implanted in her brain’s left motor cortex. Within a week, she could use the implant to move a prosthetic arm in all three dimensions, and move its wrist in an additional four. That was good enough for her to use it to take a sip of coffee with the arm, and good enough to make her a national celebrity. Researchers from the University of Pittsburg have now been able to finesse an additional three degrees of freedom out of an improved implant-to-arm pipeline by swapping in additional finger motions where previously Jan had only a crude pincer grip.
It is hard to underestimate the difficulty, and therefore value, of making advances like this to the field of brain-computer interfaces or BCIs. Mapping specific functions to specific places has generally proven difficult. We know, for example, that with crude TMS stimulation, the most reliable response obtained for activating an cortical motor area discovered to date is a simple adduction of the thumb (bringing it back into the plane of the palm of the hand). In fact, that is precisely what is used as the reference point to calibrate the coil’s position and power. It is no surprise then that researchers have now been able to add more subtle thumb control to the existing suite of prosthetic powers.
Administering the correct dosages to fight cancerous tumors can be a difficult balancing act. Too much of the radioactive drugs can cause harm to healthy tissue, but not enough will see the cancer cells survive and continue to spread. But a new technique developed at The Institute of Cancer Research in London may afford doctors an unprecedented level of accuracy in performing radiotherapy, using 3D-printed replicas of a patient’s organs and tumors to better determine how much radiation a tumor has received.
Colorado resident Les Baugh has become the newest face of bionic technology, as researchers from Johns Hopkins have fitted him with two cutting edge bionic limbs under direct control from his brain. Not only is this a major evolution for modern prosthetics, but it’s also managed to capture the imaginations of millions because it, first of all, looks really cool, and second, because it clearly illustrates the equivalence of biology and tech. The sight of the man fitted with two Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPLs) really drives the point home: we are well on our way to the sort of bionics that powerfully challenge our concept of humanity.
Whether you want to move an arm fashioned out of stem cells or carbon fiber, you always start the same way. First comes the storm of neural activity associated with a particular action, and this pattern is recognized by a tiered network of either neurons or electrodes, then funneled off to the appropriate destination. Most amputees will need to use the electrode method, but Baugh was lucky enough to have some living nerve tissue left over in his shoulders.
A stem cell therapy has been approved for widespread medical use in the EU for the first time.
Stem cells can become any type of tissue in the body and hold huge promise in medicine.
The treatment - Holoclar - is used to treat a rare eye condition that can lead to blindness. It works in around 80% of cases.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said the move represented a "major step forward" for the field.
The act of blinking strips cells off the surface of the eye. These are normally replaced by limbal stem cells in order to keep the eye healthy.
Some people, after burns or acid attacks, do not have enough limbal stem cells and the surface of the eye begins to scar.
It can eventually lead to blindness.
Restore
Research clinics and specialised centres have been testing a technique to replace the lost stem cells.
A small sample of remaining stem cells are taken, grown into larger numbers in the laboratory and placed back on to the surface of the eye.
The decision by the EMA means the therapy can move beyond a limited research or case-by-case setting and be offered far more widely.
Enrica Alteri, the head of the Human Medicines Evaluation Division at the EMA said: "This recommendation represents a major step forward in delivering new and innovative medicines to patients."
Prof Chris Mason, from University College London, told the BBC: "This is a therapy that has been done a lot and is very successful, we've treated around 20 people at Moorfields hospital.
"This move would enable far more people to access it, you could now prescribe this."
Lost memories might be able to be restored new study indicatesNew UCLA research indicates that lost memories can be restored. The findings offer some hope for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
For decades, most neuroscientists have believed that memories are stored at the synapses—the connections between brain cells, or neurons—which are destroyed by Alzheimer's disease. The new study provides evidence contradicting the idea that long-term memory is stored at synapses.
"Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse," said David Glanzman, a senior author of the study, and a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology. "That's a radical idea, but that's where the evidence leads. The nervous system appears to be able to regenerate lost synaptic connections. If you can restore the synaptic connections, the memory will come back. It won't be easy, but I believe it's possible."
The findings were published recently in eLife, a highly regarded open-access online science journal.
Ibuprofen, a common over-the-counter drug used to relieve pain and fever, could hold the keys to a longer healthier life, according to a study by researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Publishing in PLoS Genetics on December 18th, scientists showed that regular doses of ibuprofen extended the lifespan of yeast, worms and fruit flies.
“There is a lot to be excited about,” said Brian Kennedy, PhD, CEO of the Buck Institute, who said treatments, given at doses comparable to those used in humans, extended lifespan an average of 15 percent in the model organisms. “Not only did all the species live longer, but the treated flies and worms appeared more healthy,” he said. “The research shows that ibuprofen impacts a process not yet implicated in aging, giving us a new way to study and understand the aging process.” But most importantly, Kennedy said the study opens the door for a new exploration of so-called “anti-aging medicines.” “Ibuprofen is a relatively safe drug, found in most people’s medicine cabinets,” he said. “There is every reason to believe there are other existing treatments that can impact healthspan and we need to be studying them.”
Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and elsewhere say that a vaccination they have developed to fight a brain-based, wasting syndrome among deer and other animals may hold promise on two additional fronts: Protecting U.S. livestock from contracting the disease, and preventing similar brain infections in humans.
For doctors, nurses, soldiers, and other responders fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, currently available protective suits are both too hot to wear in the tropics and often a source of contagion when they're being taken off. To make moving and treating patients safer, Johns Hopkins University, along with international health affiliate Jhpiego and other partners, is developing a new anti-contamination suit for health care workers that is both cooler to wear and easier to remove.
Coronary heart disease (CHD) kills more than 385,000 people in the United States each year, and more than half of those who die suddenly have no previous symptoms. A new blood test that could reduce CHD-related illness and mortality by predicting the risk of future heart disease has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The PLAC Test for Lp-PLA2 screens for cardiovascular inflammation which can lead to a build up of rupture-prone plaque and result in a heart attack or stroke.
The development of brain plaques are thought to correlate with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, such as memory loss. Previous research has indicated that limiting these buildups could be the key to tackling the disease, but scientists from Northwestern University are digging a little deeper. The team has devised a non-invasive MRI technique capable of tracking the specific toxins that accumulate to form plaques, potentially enabling doctors to pick up early signs of the disease before it starts to take hold.
People with arthritis have been offered fresh hope after patients were effectively cured using a revolutionary electronic implant.
Doctors used tiny pacemaker style devices embedded in the necks of patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis to "hack" into their nervous systems.
The implant - whose effects were exclusively demonstrated to Sky News - fires bursts of electrical impulses into a key nerve that relays brain signals to the body's vital organs.
Your heart rate, blood oxygen level and blood pressure are all key indicators of your cardiovascular state of health. It would follow, then, that if you want to stay ahead of problems in that area, monitoring those parameters would be a great help. Well, that's just what MOCAheart is designed to do.
First of all, there are indeed already heart rate-monitoring smartphone apps that utilize the phone's camera and light. According to MOCAheart's designers, however, their device is more accurate and provides a greater amount of information.
To utilize it, users just place a finger from one hand over its optical sensor, while placing a finger from the other hand elsewhere on its stainless steel front surface. Using red and infrared lights (combined with the optical sensor), along with an EKG sensor, it then measures the electrical activity of the heart, blood oxygen levels, and blood velocity. The latter is reportedly fairly consistent with blood pressure.
Researchers could be closing in on a "fountain of youth" drug that can delay the effects of aging and improve the health of older adults, a new study suggests.
Seniors received a significant boost to their immune systems when given a drug that targets a genetic signaling pathway linked to aging and immune function, researchers with the drug maker Novartis report.
The experimental medication, a version of the drug rapamycin, improved the seniors' immune response to a flu vaccine by 20 percent, researchers said in the current issue of Science Translational Medicine.
The study is a "watershed" moment for research into the health effects of aging, said Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
Rapamycin belongs to a class of drugs known as mTOR inhibitors, which have been shown to counteract aging and aging-related diseases in mice and other animals.
Barzilai, who wasn't involved in the study, said this is one of the first studies to show that these drugs also can delay the effects of aging in humans.
"It sets the stage for using this drug to target aging, to improve everything about aging," Barzilai said. "That's really going to be for us a turning point in research, and we are very excited."
New experiments suggest that riluzole, a drug already on the market as a treatment for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), may help prevent the fading memory and clouding judgment that comes with advancing age,
Researchers at The Rockefeller University and The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found they could stop normal, age-related memory loss in rats by treating them with riluzole. The treatment prompted changes known to improve connections, and as a result, communication between certain neurons within the brain’s hippocampus.
“By examining the neurological changes that occurred after riluzole treatment, we discovered one way in which the brain’s ability to reorganize itself — its neuroplasticity — can be marshaled to protect it against some of the deterioration that can accompany old age, at least in rodents,” says co-senior study author Alfred E. Mirsky Professor Bruce McEwen, head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology. The research is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have shown for the first time that gold nanorods can effectively stop the growth of cervical cancer cells. The laboratory study of attaching the nanorods to their cell receptors used the famous HeLa cell lines as a cervical cancer model.
The gold nanorods, positioned where they are and with growth factors attached to their tips, stop the clustering of the cell receptors and halt the growth of the cell. This happens because apparently the cell receptors need to reach a certain density in a region for a signal from the growth factors to be passed into the cell.
In 2014, we are able to restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, but still figuring out a way to reverse hair loss eludes us. Well, 2015 may prove otherwise, as researchers in Spain believe they’ve found a way to spur new hair growth by using our body's immune defense to stimulate stem cells in the surrounding skin.
Stem cell technology is being used for everything, from HIV treatment to reversing neurodegenerative disease, so why not try using it to tackle the much more common problem of hair loss. According to a recent press release, scientists have figured out a way to manipulate macrophages, a certain type of white blood cell, into reactivating hair follicles. The result? No more baldness.
Signs of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) can start to appear in boys as young as six, leading to deterioration of the heart muscles and ultimately death. Pharmaceuticals aimed at controlling high blood pressure have been used to treat the one in 3,500 young males suffering from the condition, but a new study suggests that a novel combination of these drugs could slow the decline in heart function earlier on, and in promising new ways.
.Three years after a small number of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) were treated with high-dose immunosuppressive therapy and then transplanted with their own hematopoietic stem cells, most of the patients sustained remission of active relapsing-remitting MS and had improvements in neurological function, according to a study
(HealthDay)—For liver transplant recipients, universal prophylaxis and preemptive strategies (using ganciclovir or valganciclovir) are similarly effective for preventing cytomegalovirus (CMV) disease (CMD), according to research published online Dec. 17 in the American Journal of Transplantation.
Khalid Mumtaz, M.D., from The Ohio State University in Columbus, and colleagues conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine the efficacy of universal prophylaxis and preemptive strategies for preventing CMD in liver transplant recipients. The authors assessed CMD as the primary outcome, while secondary outcomes included acute cellular rejection, graft loss, and mortality. An indirect comparison of the studies was performed due to the heterogeneity of comparative studies. Data were included for 32 studies involving 2,456 liver transplant recipients.
A 22 percent drop in cancer death rates during the past two decades has spared the lives of more than 1.5 million people in this country, the American Cancer Society reported Tuesday.
In its annual dissection of cancer diagnoses, mortality and survival data, the group pinned the ongoing decline in cancer death rates on a downturn in U.S. smoking habits, extra attention to cancer prevention, improvements in various cancer treatments, and advances in early detection methods.
Neonatal HBV vaccine reduces liver cancer risk EurekAlert Science NewsNeonatal HBV vaccination reduces the risk of liver cancer and other liver diseases in young adults in China, according to a study published by Chunfeng Qu, Taoyang Chen, Yawei Zhang and colleagues from the Cancer Institute & Hospital at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Qidong Liver Cancer Institute, China, and Yale School of Public Health and School of Medicine, USA in this week's PLOS Medicine.
The researchers report long-term outcomes from the Qidong Hepatitis B intervention Study (QHBIS), a randomized controlled trial of neonatal HBV vaccination that was conducted between 1983 and 1990 in Qidong County, a rural area in China with a high incidence of HBV-related primary liver cancer (PLC) and other liver diseases. In this study, 41 rural towns (including a total of 77,658 newborns over the study period) were randomized to the intervention (HBV vaccination for all newborns) or control (no vaccination) groups, with two-thirds of the control group participants receiving a catch-up vaccination at age 10-14 years.
Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper died at the ripe old age of 115 in 2005, making her one of the longest lived humans on record. For a woman her age she was also in considerably good health until shortly before she passed away. She was also kind enough to donate her body to science and scientists have been eager to find out more about her, which may help to increase our understanding of ageing. In particular, researchers based at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam were keen to know more about the accumulation of mutations in somatic cells as we age.
In the study, which has been published in the journal Genome Research, the team used deep whole-genome sequencing and found 450 somatic mutations within her healthy white blood cells. Furthermore, these mutations were enriched in noncoding regions that are not evolutionarily conserved and appeared to be harmless passenger mutations, unlike those associated with disease.
