Here is an interesting little device that can supposedly save teeth, prevent wrist and hand osteoarthritis and deep tissue injuries, and avert the onset of major depression. And did we tell you, it is touted to open those impenetratable and indestructible plastic packages that are now so common?
More at Open-X®…
Archives: 5/2005
Aspirin is a powerful and important medication in management of various cardiovascular diseases. Simply put, aspirin shuts down the platelets, a clot-producing cells, and mainly through this action aspirin helps prevent heart attacks and strokes.
Newsday reports that up to 27 percent of people taking aspirin may be resistant to it. The test developed by a San Diego-based company Accumetrics, can accurately predict the necessary dose of aspirin for a particular patient.
The company describes its system:
The VerifyNow™ Aspirin Assay is a qualitative test to aid in the detection of platelet dysfunction due to aspirin (ASA) ingestion in citrated whole blood for the point of care or laboratory setting.
The VerifyNow™ System is a turbidimetric based optical detection system which measures platelet induced aggregation as an increase in light transmittance. The system consists of an instrument, a disposable assay device and controls. The assay device contains reagents based on microbead agglutination technology. The assay device contains a lyophilized preparation of human fibrinogen-coated beads, platelet agonist, preservative and buffer. The patient sample is 3.2% citrated whole blood, which is automatically dispensed from the blood collection tube into the assay device by the instrument, with no blood handling required by the user.
More at Accumetrics…
Interesting results are reported from the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at UC Irvine:
A treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells improves mobility in rats with spinal cord injuries, providing the first physical evidence that the therapeutic use of these cells can help restore motor skills lost from acute spinal cord tissue damage.
Hans Keirstead and his colleagues in the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at UC Irvine have found that a human embryonic stem cell-derived treatment they developed was successful in restoring the insulation tissue for neurons in rats treated seven days after the initial injury, which led to a recovery of motor skills. But the same treatment did not work on rats that had been injured for 10 months. The findings point to the potential of using stem cell-derived therapies for treatment of spinal cord damage in humans during the very early stages of the injury. The study appears in the May 11 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
For the study, the UCI team used a novel technique they created to entice human embryonic stem cells to differentiate into early-stage oligodendrocyte cells. Oligodendrocytes are the building blocks of myelin, the biological insulation for nerve fibers that is critical for maintenance of electrical conduction in the central nervous system. When myelin is stripped away through disease or injury, sensory and motor deficiencies result and, in some cases, paralysis can occur.
The researchers injected these cells into rats that had experienced a partial injury to the spinal cord that impairs walking ability – one group seven days after injury and another 10 months after injury. In both groups, the early-stage cells formed into full-grown oligodendrocyte cells and migrated to appropriate neuronal sites within the spinal cord.
In the rats treated seven days after the injury, myelin tissue formed as the oligodendrocyte cells wrapped around damaged neurons in the spinal cord. Within two months, these rats began to show significant improvements in walking ability in comparison to injured rats who received no treatment.
In the rats with 10-month-old injuries, though, motor skills did not return. Although the oligodendrocyte cells survived in the chronic injury sites, they could not form myelin because the space surrounding neuron cells had been filled with scar tissue. In the presence of a scar, myelin could not grow.
These studies indicate the importance of myelin loss in spinal cord injury, and illustrate one approach to treating myelin loss. Keirstead and his colleagues are currently working on other approaches using human embryonic stem cells to treat chronic injuries and other disorders of the central nervous system.
Yesterday’s press release…
From the Triplexgoldteeth.com Collection
Flashback: Urban Cosmetic Dentistry (part 1)
Wired essay about at-home assays:
The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a setof precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months – the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.
Still, don’t expect to cure cancer right away, surprise your loved ones with a stylish new feather goatee, or crank out a devilish frankenbug. (Instant bioterrorism is likely beyond your reach, too.) The goodies you buy online require practice to use properly. The necessary skills may be acquired through trial and error, studying online curricula, or taking a lab course at a community college. Although there are cookbook recipes for procedures to purify DNA or insert it into a bacterium, bench biology is not easy; the many molecular manipulations required to play with genes demand real skills.
Science, after all, involves doing things no one has done before, and it most often requires developing new art. But art can be learned, and, more important, this kind of art can be taught to robots. They excel at repetitive tasks requiring consistent precision, and an online search will uncover a wide variety of lab automation tools for sale. For a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, you can purchase boxy-looking robots with spindly arms that handle platefuls of samples, mix and distribute reagents – and make a fine martini. Some of the units are sophisticated enough that you can teach them all the new tricks published in fancy journals. Just make sure you have plenty of electrical outlets.
In an article at The Age about Aussie nano-technology, we read about a Sydney-based medical diagnostics group Ambri. The company has designed a biosensor that converts a biological binding event into a digital electrical signal. This enables the biosensor to employ computer technology to analyse and define this biological event.
Some basic info about the technology:
The AMBRI™ Ion Channel Switch™ (ICS™) Sensor is one of the world’s first true bionanotechnology devices. A self-assembling, synthetic, two molecular layer bio-membrane, the ICS™ acts like a biological switch and is capable of detecting a range of biological and chemical substances such as drugs, hormones, bacteria, DNA, and ions, in any body fluid, including whole blood, urine, and saliva. The biological switch is triggered when a molecule binds to an antibody fragment, this changes the number of conducting ion channel pairs within the membrane, which in turn, alters the way the membrane conducts. The resulting change in ion flow is measured by Ambri’s sophisticated technology and analytical software as a variation in current which determines the identity of the molecular material under investigation. The technology is built on the nanometer scale, using molecular components one-thousand-millionth of a meter in size. Ambri’s ICS™ Technology mimics biological sensory functions and can be used with most types of receptor, including antibodies and nucleotides. The sensor is essentially an impedance element whose dimensions can readily be reduced to become an integral component of a microelectronic circuit.
Ambri has built a biological switch: a membrane which can detect the presence of specific molecules and signal their presence by triggering an electrical current. This device — the Ambri Ion Channel Switch(ICS™) Biosensor — is a two molecular layer self assembled membrane based on the ion channel gramicidin.
The diagram shows the various components of the AMBRI® Biosensor — the molecule to be detected, the antibody fragments, the linker protein steptavidin and biotin linkers, the membrane layers with included gramicidin molecules.
The AMBRI® biosensor operates as a synthetic mimic of a nerve cell membrane.
The key elements in this artificial membrane are:
– membrane forming molecules chemically tethered to a surface
– simple ion channels within the membrane which facilitate the transport of ions like sodium
–an ionically conducting reservoir space between the electronically conductive gold surface and the membrane to store ions when they have crossed the membrane.
– receptors such as antibodies attached to the membrane to recognise target molecules.
More about The AMBRI® biosensor technology…
Ambri Limited homepage…
The 16th Annual MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition has concluded yesterday. For the fourth year in a row, a medical device company has won $50K of the Robert P. Goldberg Grand Prize. According to a press report, Balico, the company that designed a wearable, vibrotactile balance aid that will benefit aging adults and individuals whose primary sensing systems are affected by disease, was awarded $30,000 in start-up money.
The list of finalists…
MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition website…
NOTE: Balico doesn’t have a website at the present time. We’ll follow up on this…
The fifth and final Reith lecture in the series The Triumph of Technology has been broadcast by the BBC. The lecture is titled Risk and Responsibility. A download of .mp3 and .ram formats is available The Washington Post is reporting about a questionable new trend of sending radiologic images taken of patients in the U.S. to doctors overseas, who in turn provide their opinions on what they see. Patients don’t always know of this practice, and the fact that the doctors are not board certified in the U.S. is raising eyebrows, at least here at Medgadget.
When patients needed urgent CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds late at night at St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury, Conn., emergency room workers used to rouse a bleary-eyed staff radiologist from his bed to read the images. Not anymore.
The work now goes to Arjun Kalyanpur — 8,000 miles away in Bangalore, India. When it is the middle of the night in Connecticut, Kalyanpur is in the middle of his day, handling calls from St. Mary’s and dozens of other American hospitals that transmit pictures to him electronically so he can quickly assess them and advise their doctors.
Kalyanpur runs one of an increasing number of “nighthawk” companies operating in the United States and overseas to take advantage of time-zone differences and the latest technology by having radiologists read images from such far-flung places as Hawaii, India, Australia, Switzerland, Israel and Brazil.
