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Category: health – Page 294

ARROW, a reconfigurable fiber optics network, aims to take on the end of Moore’s law

Wide Area Networks (WANs), the global backbones and workhorses of today’s internet that connect billions of computers over continents and oceans, are the foundation of modern online services. As COVID-19 has placed a vital reliance on online services, today’s networks are struggling to deliver high bandwidth and availability imposed by emerging workloads related to machine learning, video calls, and health care.

To connect WANs over hundreds of miles, fiber optic cables that transmit data using light are threaded throughout our neighborhoods, made of incredibly thin strands of glass or plastic known as optical fibers. While they’re extremely fast, they’re not always reliable: They can easily break from weather, thunderstorms, accidents, and even animals. These tears can cause severe and expensive damage, resulting in 911 service outages, lost connectivity to the internet, and inability to use smartphone apps.

Scientists from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and from Facebook recently came up with a way to preserve the network when the fiber is down, and to reduce cost. Their system, called ARROW, reconfigures the optical light from a damaged fiber to healthy ones, while using an online algorithm to proactively plan for potential fiber cuts ahead of time, based on real-time internet traffic demands.

5 Things Big Pharma Can Expect from the 2020s / Episode 13 — The Medical Futurist

The global revenue of the pharmaceutical market is 1.2 trillion dollars. With such capital at stake and with the pace of technological disruption, the pharma industry has to embrace new technologies, therapies, and innovations and put a greater focus on prevention and digital health.

In this video, we take a dive into the five trends of how big pharma will adapt to these changing times:

1. Artificial intelligence for drug research and development.
2. Patient design — DIY medicine movements.
3. In silico trials to bypass in vivo clinical testing.
4. New technologies, such as blockchain, in the supply chain.
5. New drug strategies by big pharma companies.

Get access to exclusive content and express your support for The Medical Futurist by joining our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/themedicalfuturist.

Read our magazine for further updates and analyses on the future of healthcare:
https://medicalfuturist.com/magazine.

#pharmaceutics #digitalhealth #pharma

Continue reading “5 Things Big Pharma Can Expect from the 2020s / Episode 13 — The Medical Futurist” | >

Which Gut Bacteria Are Associated With Poor Health, And How Can We Limit Them?

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Papers referenced in the video:
Human microbiome: an academic update on human body site specific surveillance and its possible role.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32524177/

Taxonomic signatures of cause-specific mortality risk in human gut microbiome.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33976176/

The Role of Short-Chain Fatty Acids From Gut Microbiota in Gut-Brain Communication.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32082260/

Inhibiting antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteriaceae by microbiota-mediated intracellular acidification.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30563917/

Short chain fatty acids in human large intestine, portal, hepatic and venous blood.

Continue reading “Which Gut Bacteria Are Associated With Poor Health, And How Can We Limit Them?” | >

COVID-19: What you need to know about SARS-CoV-2 variants

Mutations are a part of life. Every time a virus replicates, there is a chance that its genetic code won’t be copied accurately. These typos travel inside new virus particles as they leave one body and move on to infect the next. Some of these mutations die out; others survive and circulate widely. Some mutations are harmless; others increase infectivity or allow a virus to better escape the immune system—that’s when public health bodies might deem that strain a variant of concern.

Swaps or deletions of single amino acids can change the shapes of different proteins. Mutations can happen in any of the proteins of SARS-CoV-2, and these may change the virus’s properties. Many of the worrisome mutations are found on the spike protein, as it is the target of antibody treatments and is mimicked by the currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers are especially troubled when typos occur in two parts of the spike protein—the N-terminal domain, which is at the beginning of the protein and which some antibodies target, and the receptor-binding domain (RBD), which grabs hold of ACE2 receptors on human cells and starts the process of infection.

To understand how specific mutations affect the structure and function of the spike protein and what those changes mean for treatments and vaccines, C&EN talked to Priyamvada Acharya, Rory Henderson, and Sophie Gobeil at Duke University. With colleagues, these researchers have combined biochemical assays, cryo-electron microscopy, and modeling to show how the mutations seen in the variants of concern work together to change the stability of the spike protein. The spike is a trimer of three identical protein strands folded and interwoven together. Before the virus has infected a cell, the spike takes on two conformations: a down state, in which the RBD is hidden, and an up state, in which the RBD faces out, ready to bind to ACE2. The team found that different mutations can increase binding in different ways. This process, in which similar features are arrived at independently, is called convergent evolution.

SARS-CoV-2 variants are emerging and gaining traction around the world. What does that mean for our vaccines and treatments for COVID-19?

Two die in Japan after shots from suspended Moderna vaccines

TOKYO, Aug 28 (Reuters) — Two people died after receiving Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) COVID-19 vaccine shots that were among lots later suspended following the discovery of contaminants, Japan’s health ministry said on Saturday.

The men in their 30s died this month within days of receiving their second Moderna doses, the ministry said in a release. Each had a shot from one of three manufacturing lots suspended on Thursday. The causes of death are being investigated.

A vision-based robotic system for 3D ultrasound imaging

Ultrasound imaging techniques have proved to be highly valuable tools for diagnosing a variety of health conditions, including peripheral artery disease (PAD). PAD, one of the most common diseases among the elderly, entails the blocking or narrowing of peripheral blood vessels, which limits the supply of blood to specific areas of the body.

Ultrasound imaging methods are among the most popular means of diagnosing PAD, due to their many advantageous characteristics. In fact, unlike other imaging methods, such as computed tomography angiography and , ultrasound imaging is non-invasive, low-cost and radiation-free.

Most existing ultrasound imaging techniques are designed to capture in real time. While this can be helpful in some cases, their inability to collect three-dimensional information reduces the reliability of the data they gather, increasing their sensitivity to variations in how individual physicians used a given technique.

Engineer Builds His Own X-Ray After Hospital Charges Him $69K

Almost a third of working Americans are in some form of medical debt, with nearly a quarter of those with an outstanding balance owing $10,000 or more. Many Americans feel anxious about health care costs and are depleting their own savings to pay the bills, or avoiding going to the doctor due to the cost, and in some cases, as in the case of William Osman, embarking on bizarre projects to highlight the issue.

The YouTuber and engineer, who is known for his bizarre projects that combine engineering and entertainment, posted a video last week outlining how a recent hospital visit requiring X-rays resulted in a staggering $69,210.32 bill.

He explains that, thanks to his health insurance policy, he will only have to pay roughly $2,500, and that, when combined with annual insurance costs, the total will be around $8,500. In a comedic sequence, he laments, “I’m a slave to medical debt now. I have to sell all my things, I have to sell my friends’ belongings.” Then, he embarks on an extremely reckless and risky endeavor to build his own fully functional X-ray machine for less than the cost of his actual medical expenses.

The death of the job

“I think it’s changed everything, and I think it’s changed everything fundamentally,” James Livingston, a history professor at Rutgers University and the author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea, told Vox.

We’ll (probably) always have work, but could the job as the centerpiece of American life be on the way out?

To understand the question, you have to know how the country got to where it is today. The story starts, to some degree, with a failure. Much of American labor law — as well as the social safety net, such as it is — stems from union organizing and progressive action at the federal level in the 1930s, culminating in the New Deal. At that time, many unions were pushing for a national system of pensions not dependent on jobs, as well as national health care, Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Vox. They did win Social Security, but with many people left out, such as agricultural and domestic workers, it wasn’t a full nationwide retirement system. And when it came to universal health care, they lost entirely.

The evolution of commercial drug delivery technologies

Drug delivery technologies have enabled the development of many pharmaceutical products that improve patient health by enhancing the delivery of a therapeutic to its target site, minimizing off-target accumulation and facilitating patient compliance. As therapeutic modalities expanded beyond small molecules to include nucleic acids, peptides, proteins and antibodies, drug delivery technologies were adapted to address the challenges that emerged. In this Review Article, we discuss seminal approaches that led to the development of successful therapeutic products involving small molecules and macromolecules, identify three drug delivery paradigms that form the basis of contemporary drug delivery and discuss how they have aided the initial clinical successes of each class of therapeutic. We also outline how the paradigms will contribute to the delivery of live-cell therapies.

This Review Article discusses how delivery challenges associated with small molecules, nucleic acids, peptides, proteins and cells led to the development of commercial products and are now informing the delivery of live-cell therapeutics.

Earbuds That Read Your Mind

Summary: Retrofitting wireless earbuds to detect neural signals and relaying the data back to smartphones via Bluetooth, researchers say the new earEEG system could have multiple applications, including health monitoring.

Source: UC Berkeley.

From keypads to touch screens to voice commands – step by step, the interface between users and their smartphones has become more personalized, more seamless. Now the ultimate personalized interface is approaching: issuing smartphone commands with your brain waves.

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