Researchers at Australia’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience are exploring new frontiers in healthcare and energy storage. Bec Crew reports.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2041
United Parcel Service Inc. is striking a series of drone-delivery agreements with health-care groups as it develops new technology pitched to the growing medical market.
The plans include expanding the use of drones to deliver cargo such as medical samples and supplies on hospital campuses in Utah and elsewhere, and an agreement with CVS Health Corp. to evaluate the use of drones for home delivery of prescriptions and other products, UPS said Monday.
The agreements are the first UPS has announced since the package delivery giant won U.S. regulatory approval to operate commercial drone flights through the company’s Flight Forward subsidiary. The nod from the Federal Aviation Administration paves the way for UPS to scale up operations as it competes with FedEx Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and others vying to develop drone delivery services in the U.S.
CRISPR therapy — Injecting the gene-editing tool CRISPR into the brains of mice may reverse the effects of an autism mutation at any age.
At stake is not just the well-being of millions of Chinese people, but the future of the global healthcare industry. China has set its sights on creating a holy grail healthcare system that satisfies patients’ needs and control costs while still encouraging cutting-edge research—and the world is watching.
Whether it succeeds will affect the future of the global industry.
H/T Dr. Jason Williams
Creatine, the organic acid that is popularly taken as a supplement by athletes and bodybuilders, serves as a molecular battery for immune cells by storing and distributing energy to power their fight against cancer, according to new UCLA research.
The study, conducted in mice and published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, is the first to show that creatine uptake is critical to the anti-tumor activities of CD8 T cells, also known as killer T cells, the foot soldiers of the immune system. The researchers also found that creatine supplementation can improve the efficacy of existing immunotherapies.
“Because oral creatine supplements have been broadly utilized by bodybuilders and athletes for the past three decades, existing data suggest they are likely safe when taken at appropriate doses,” said Lili Yang, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and the study’s senior author. “This could provide a clear and expedient path forward for the use of creatine supplementation to enhance existing cancer immunotherapies.”
Brain-connected machines that capture and translate electrical signals are showing great promise across a number of areas, but one with massive potential is the world of prosthetics. Scientists exploring these possibilities at Johns Hopkins University are now reporting a big breakthrough, demonstrating a system that enables a quadriplegic to control two prosthetics arms at once using only his thoughts, and also feel a sense of touch coming back the other way.
The team at Johns Hopkins University has been making some exciting progress in this area through its Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was launched by DARPA in 2006. In 2016, we saw a double amputee use his brain to control two of the team’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPLs), bilateral shoulder-level prosthetics that enabled him to do things like move cups between shelves, a first for this kind of research.
This system worked via custom sockets which both supported the artificial limbs and hooked them up to nerves in the patient’s torso which, following a treatment regime, had been trained to provide specific control movements for the prosthetic limbs. Five years on, the team has made some advances.
Researchers now have shown that they are instead made up of many individual bioelectric units generating energy- like a Tesla Battery. https://embopress.org/doi/10.15252/embj.2018101056&h=AT3…nuqUCir7ik
https://bit.ly/2J4Tkho&h=AT1YJICM5AliiHbU1dzQWsUOBj2Pv4x…AZG5eAMbU–\-\DuoKFZH11ht3gbqMTwxduJkRJYCYZr7uE11trWGGCm-ecSp9kMw
Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski
Posted in biotech/medical, innovation
The Burzynski Patient Group mission is to raise public awareness of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s breakthrough treatment for cancer using Antineoplastons and gene-targeted therapy.
Genetic differences in the immune system shape the collections of bacteria that colonize the digestive system, according to new research by scientists at the University of Chicago.
In carefully controlled experiments using germ-free mice populated with microbes from conventionally raised mice, the researchers showed that while the makeup of the microbial input largely determined the resulting microbiome of the recipients, genetic differences between strains of mice played a role as well.
“When the input is standardized, you can compare mice of different genetic strains and see what these genetics do to the microbiome in recipient mice,” said microbiome researcher Alexander Chervonsky, MD, Ph.D., a senior author of the new study, published in Cell Reports. “This approach allowed us to tell whether there was a genetic influence, and indeed there is. So, the next question was what mechanisms are involved?”