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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1593

Drexel University researchers are one step closer to offering a new treatment for the millions of patients who suffer from slow-healing, chronic wounds. The battery-powered applicator — as small and light as a watch — is the first portable and potentially wearable device to heal wounds with low-frequency ultrasound.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the research team an estimated $3 million to test the therapy on 120 patients over the next five years. By using diagnostic monitoring of blood flow in the wound tissue, the clinical trial will also determine how nutrition and inflammation impact wound closure, making treatment customization a possibility.

The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing and Health Professions.

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Circa 2008

Three independent research teams have successfully performed organ transplantations that do not require the recipient to face a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection. Instead, the new techniques prevent rejection by training the immune system to recognize the new organ as its own.

The three studies, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, are preliminary and involve only a few patients. But if the techniques can be reproduced in a larger population, they could eliminate one of the most enduring scars of the operation: the need to continue taking sometimes-dangerous immunosuppressant drugs.

Thousands of kidney transplantations are performed every year, and nearly 99% of patients in the United States are still alive a year after the surgery. But even when the organ donor is a close relative, the transplant recipient often needs to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives to guard against organ rejection. But although the drugs help to prevent rejection, they also increase the risk of infection and are very pricey.

Continue reading “Organ transplants without rejection” | >

The organ-on-a-chip (OOAC) is in the list of top 10 emerging technologies and refers to a physiological organ biomimetic system built on a microfluidic chip. Through a combination of cell biology, engineering, and biomaterial technology, the microenvironment of the chip simulates that of the organ in terms of tissue interfaces and mechanical stimulation. This reflects the structural and functional characteristics of human tissue and can predict response to an array of stimuli including drug responses and environmental effects. OOAC has broad applications in precision medicine and biological defense strategies. Here, we introduce the concepts of OOAC and review its application to the construction of physiological models, drug development, and toxicology from the perspective of different organs. We further discuss existing challenges and provide future perspectives for its application.

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Brain on a chip for drug discovery.

Since the advent of organ-on-a-chip, many researchers have tried to mimic the physiology of human tissue on an engineered platform. In the case of brain tissue, structural connections and cell–cell interactions are important factors for brain function. The recent development of brain-on-a-chip is an effort to mimic those structural and functional aspects of brain tissue within a miniaturized engineered platform. From this perspective, we provide an overview of trace of brain-on-a-chip development, especially in terms of complexity and high-content/high-throughput screening capabilities, and future perspectives on more in vivo-like brain-on-a-chip development.

With the advent of an aging society, the disease incidence rate is increasing, and the cost of drug development and disease treatment is expanding exponentially.1,2 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly one billion people in the world suffer from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s diseases.3 Despite decades of research on neurodegenerative diseases by many biologists and pharmaceutical companies, the underlying mechanism of their onset and progression is still largely unknown. The resolution of these diseases has a long way to go, and such steps are limited due to the lack of a suitable in vitro model system for mechanism study and drug development. In particular, the complex tissue structures and cell–cell interactions of the in vivo system make it challenging to unravel the underlying mechanism of the diseases and to predict the efficacy of clinical medicine.

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Japan’s government to join forces with industry to supercharge development.

TOKYO — A trip of 500 km on one charge. A recharge from zero to full in 10 minutes. All with minimal safety concerns. The solid-state battery being introduced by Toyota promises to be a game changer not just for electric vehicles but for an entire industry.

The technology is a potential cure-all for the drawbacks facing electric vehicles that run on conventional lithium-ion batteries, including the relatively short distance traveled on a single charge as well as charging times. Toyota plans to be the first company to sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s. The world’s largest automaker will unveil a prototype next year.

The electric vehicles being developed by Toyota will have a range more than twice the distance of a vehicle running on a conventional lithium-ion battery under the same conditions. All accomplished without sacrificing interior space in even the most compact vehicle.

Continue reading “Toyota’s game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut” | >

“Researchers report today that they’ve created a nontoxic and nonhallucinogenic chemical cousin of ibogaine that combats depression and addictive behaviors in rodents. The work provides new hope that chemists may one day be able to create medicines for people that offer the purported therapeutic benefits of ibogaine and other psychoactive compounds without their side effects.”

Analog of ibogaine could hold hope for humans.

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Advanced, others might like.

The exact gene that caused stem cell aging has been identified.

Above – When mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) age, the transcription factor GATA6 is increasingly produced in the cell to induce aging response. By transcription factor-based cellular reprogramming, aged MSCs are rejuvenated with a reduction in GATA6 effects on cellular aging. CREDIT AlphaMed Press

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found that the expression of GATA6, a protein that plays an important role in gut, lung and heart development, was repressed in the reprogrammed cells compared to the control cells. This repression led to an increase in the activity of a protein essential to embryonic development called sonic hedgehog (SHH) as well as the expression level of yet another protein, FOXP1, necessary for proper development of the brain, heart and lung. “Thus, we identified the GATA6/SHH/FOXP1 pathway as a key mechanism that regulates MSC aging and rejuvenation,” Dr. Li said.

Continue reading “Genes for Regulating Stem Cell Aging Identified” | >

A shirt that monitors your blood pressure or a pair of socks that can keep track of your cholesterol levels might be just a few years away from becoming reality.

In an article published in Applied Physics Reviews, researchers examine the use of microfibers, and even smaller nanofibers, as wearable monitors that could keep track of a patient’s vital signs.

The microfiber- and nanofiber-based technology addresses growing concerns in the medical community about monitoring like diabetes, asthma, obesity, and high as the population ages.

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Spider silk is a protein fiber spun by spiders, which they use to make webs or other structures, which function as sticky nets to catch other animals, or as nests or cocoons to protect their offspring, or to wrap up prey. They can also use their silk to suspend themselves, to float through the air, or to glide away from predators.

Each spider and each type of silk has a set of mechanical properties optimized for their biological function, but in particular, their dragline silks, have exceptional mechanical properties. They exhibit a unique combination of high tensile strength and extensibility which enables a silk fiber to absorb a large amount of energy before breaking with this estimated tensile strength several times that of steel.

Alex Greenhalgh, is the CEO, Spintex, a spin-out from the University of Oxford, pushing the boundaries of bio-inspired spinning and silk materials to provide much needed solution in sustainable and technical textiles.

Alex is a biologist and programmer with a working background in microbiology, clinical trials with a focus on GCP compliance, and silk and protein science where he has been a research assistant in the Oxford Silk Group for the last three-years. His research experience includes characterization of liquid silks and fibres with techniques such as rheology, fluorimetry, calorimetry, electrophoresis and tensile testing.

Continue reading “The Real Spider Man — Alex Greenhalgh, CEO, Spintex — Novel And Powerful Bio-Materials and Fabrics” | >