Date-rape drugs exist, and people use them. So if you like to err on the side of caution, or if you’re a date-rapist vigilante, the Drink Detective is for you. It is a disposable matchbook sized kit that can detect the three major types of date rape drugs: GHB, ketamine and flunitrazepam. It’s an interesting concept, the only problem we find with it is that it runs for about $6.50 per drink testing kit. While it doesn’t really seem feasible for people to actually use this in an alcohol-filled social setting, it’s a good start to developing a more re-usable and affordable solution.
Check out a video of the Drink Detective in action!
Product page…
Archives: 6/2006
Last year we reported on the Ritract Safety Syringe, a special syringe designed to prevent accidental needlestick injuries. Maxxon Inc. announced today that their product, the Maxxon Safety Syringe, is nearing FDA-approval. The syringe uses a unique vacuum system to rapidly retract the needle once the injection is complete. The market for safety-engineered medical devices (SEMDs) is supposedly now valued at around $1.6 billion, so keep an eye out.
See a pretty nifty animation of the syringe in action here…
The Bang & Olufsen E3000 stethoscope is a pretty slick thing to wrap around your neck.
Of course, when it’s for sale at 3M / Littmann it doesn’t look as impressively sleek (but their catalog of pathological heart and lung sounds is useful). Here’s how the sound filtering is explained:
3M’s proprietary ANR technology acoustically cancels out an average of 75% of distracting room noise. This acoustic canceling out is different than electronic filtering, which may also filter out some important portions of body sounds.
Ambient noise isn’t just in the air; it also travels through the patient’s body. The key to reducing ambient noise is to address both pathways. And ANR does just that without filtering away important sounds. Noise from the room enters the stethoscope through a thin gap in the chestpiece and, once inside, meets noise that enters through the body. The two cancel each other out, leaving heart, lung, and other body sounds you need to hear.
You can save, replay, and download sounds from the stethoscope. No word yet on iPod integration (the iSteth has been rumored for years…)
This award-winning stethoscope is just one medical product that Bang & Olufsen‘s Medicom subsiary has developed (their pill-popper is kinda neat, too).
Via Gizmodo…
In our ongoing chronicles of sleep technology vs. waking technology, the alarm clocks seemed to be getting a lot more advanced than the sleep tech.
But here’s one (small) point for the sleepyheads — a Japanese firm called Lofty is launching a computerized, sensor-laden pillow that will tell you when you’ve earned a nap. The sensors apparently count your head movements overnight, and compare it to the baseline average. If you’ve had another rough night, the LCD monitor will tell you.
Or, you could save $390 and listen to your body.
At least this device marks an improvement over Lofty’s 2004 effort, which was a doll that would harangue owners to go to sleep or wake up. Progress!
More from Lofty (in Japanese)…
Via Engadget…
Targeting drugs to pass through the blood-brain barrier and reach a particular region of the brain is a difficult task. One possible solution, using ultrasound, is described this week over at MIT’s Technology Review:
Focused ultrasound works by directing sound waves toward a point in space. Individually, the waves are not powerful enough to affect the tissue, but when targeted, their collective intensity is much greater. High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), which applies more intense sound waves, has been used to destroy tumors through heating, a process known as ablation.
When targeting the brain, though, Konofagou’s team used much lower-intensity levels, similar to those applied in diagnostic ultrasound, the technology used during a pregnancy sonogram. While researchers don’t know exactly how this technique is able to open the barrier, they say it’s not through heating.
Unlike tumor ablation –and this distinction is key — Konofagou’s technique appears to be reversible. Using an MRI contrast agent, she was able to show that the barrier closed up after about four hours. This is important, explains Pierre Mourad, principal physicist and research associate professor in the department of neurological surgery at the University of Washington, because “the longer the blood-brain barrier is open, the longer you let nasty stuff in the brain.”
More from Konofagou’s recent ASA talk in Providence, RI…
It was only recently that we stumbled on some news about researchers from the Dartmouth Medical School testing “new imaging techniques to find breast abnormalities, including cancer.” One of the ways these researchers were scanning for cancer was by using near-infrared imaging technology.
One system utilizing a similar scanning technique is already on the market. It is called the Sentinel BreastScan, from Infrared Sciences Corp., a New York based company.
Here’s more about this company’s device:
Indications for Use:
The Infrared Sciences BreastScanIR System is intended for viewing and recording heat patterns generated by the human body in the hospital, acute care settings, outpatient surgery, healthcare practitioner facilities or in an environment where patient care is provided by qualified healthcare personnel. The patient population includes adults. The device is for adjunctive diagnostic screening for detection of breast cancer and diseases affecting blood perfusion or reperfusion of tissue or organs…
Is infrared able to detect cancer early? What does infrared detect?
Numerous studies have shown that infrared can detect the signs of developing cancer years before modalities such as mammography; by up to 10 years, and that it is a good indicator of risk for breast cancer.
Infrared is able to detect the physiologic changes that are often associated with developing disease, as well as the detection of neo-angiogenesis (new blood vessels that develop to feed cancerous tumors). Much of the past and current uses of this technology made measurements that, in one way or another, assessed the differences when comparing both breasts. Symmetry between breasts is one of the most telling signs that can be measured and quantified by the Sentinel BreastScan system. The determination of areas within the breasts that show a high degree of blood perfusion, or vessels that may be angiogenic, are also of importance. ISC has developed proprietary software that locates these areas accurately, and is able to assign a value for the degree of abnormality. In nearly 100% of cases where there was a localized cancer (excluding inflammatory breast disease which may involve the whole breast), the Sentinel BreastScan has accurately identified the location. A doctor using this “road map” of sites that exhibit abnormal signs, can then make a very thorough evaluation of the area. In some cases where these sites are within dense tissue and a proper assessment cannot be made by mammography, other modalities, such as ultrasound or MRI, may be indicated…
How does Sentinel BreastScan work?
Sentinel BreastScan applies the medical knowledge of angiogenesis in order to quickly and harmlessly assess a patient’s risk of having breast cancer. During the exam the patient sits in a chair disrobed from the waist up, with her arms on the armrests. In front of the patient is the Sentinel BreastScan equipment, including the infrared camera, a cool air source, a video display so the patient can see her own infrared image in real time, and the operator’s station. Once the exam begins the patient’s thermal images will be recorded for analysis. A few seconds later the cool air source is turned on. The cool air source remains on for approximately 3-4 minutes. Once the cool air source is turned off the exam is complete. At this point the software within the system can analyze the recorded images for possible abnormalities. The system searches the images for signs of abnormal angiogenesis, as well as several other known thermal indicators. The analysis takes approximately 4-5 minutes and a report is generated by the system.
Infrared Sciences is reporting that its device is demonstrating sensitivity of over 98% and specificity is measured at just over 50% “on an immediate time scale.” As you can see, though the idea of breast thermography has been around a long time, technology improvements are moving this diagnostic modality in the right direction.
Company website…
UC San Diego has developed a petri dish that can quickly and cost-effectively determine a cell’s ‘health’ under different conditions. Let’s just say it’s smarter than your average petri dish. From the press release:
Their invention, described in the June 20 issue of Langmuir, a physical chemistry journal published by the American Chemical Society, uses porous silicon crystals filled with polystyrene to detect subtle changes in the sizes and shapes of the cells.
“You could also in principle use this to identify metastatic cancer cells circulating in a patient’s blood,” Sailor adds, “by putting blood samples from a patient onto the crystal and comparing them to normal blood samples.”
In addition, says Michael Schwartz, a postdoctoral scholar in Sailor’s laboratory and the first author of the paper: “The potential of our technique for fundamental studies of cell toxicity is exciting, Since we can monitor cells in real time without removing them from their natural environment, the observed changes provide a time course for performing more detailed tests to find out why drugs are toxic.”
The scientists constructed their Smart Petri Dish by first fabricating silicon crystals with nanometer-sized holes. This enabled them to produce a photonic crystal, capable of controlling light within the structure analogous to the way that semiconductors transmit electricity through computer chips. By attaching rat liver cells to the polystyrene within the crystals and measuring the scattering of light with a sensitive spectrometer, they were able to detect small changes in the shapes of the cells as they reacted to toxic doses of cadmium chloride and acetaminophen.
“As these cells shrivel up in response to a toxin, they scatter light better, much like fog on a car windshield, allowing us to quickly detect which drugs may have adverse side effects when taken in combination with another,” says Sailor. “You’re not supposed to drink alcohol when taking acetaminophen, because the combination of the two is much more toxic to your liver than either drug individually. This is known as an adverse drug-drug interaction and it is very expensive and time-consuming to screen a new drug candidate with all the possible combinations of drugs that a patient may be taking. The Smart Petri Dish allows us to perform a large number of such toxicity assays simultaneously, in order to provide an early indication of the particular physiological or pharmacological conditions that need more in-depth study.”
“Although we performed these experiments on rat cells, this technology can be easily extended to human cells,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor of bioengineering at UCSD now at MIT, who also participated in the study. “This is important because we know that the enzymes that metabolize drugs-the P450 family-are very different in animal and humans. This is one of the reasons many drugs clear animal testing but end up toxic in patients. This type of sensor could help us predict human liver responses without patient exposure.”
If you have ever tried any sort of cell diagnostic test you’ll probably understand why we’re so excited about this easy to use real-time technology.
Read the press release here…
More…
A lead researcher from the Sandia National Laboratories is asserting that nanoscience computer simulations are a better scientific tool than experiments:
Taking issue with the perception that computer models lack realism, a Sandia National Laboratories researcher told his audience that simulations of the nanoscale provide researchers more detailed results – not less – than experiments alone.
The invited talk by Eliot Fang was delivered to members of the Materials Research Society at its recent semiannual general meeting.
Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.
Fang derided the pejorative “garbage in, garbage out” description of computer modeling – the belief that inputs for computer simulations are so generic that outcomes fail to generate the unexpected details found only by actual experiment.
Fang not only denied this truism but reversed it. “There’s another, prettier world beyond what the SEM [scanning electron microscope] shows, and it’s called simulation,” he told his audience. “When you look through a microscope, you don’t see some things that modeling and simulation show.”
This change in the position of simulations in science – from weak sister to an ace card – is a natural outcome of improvements in computing, Fang says. “Fifteen years ago, the Cray YMP [supercomputer] was the crown jewel; it’s now equivalent to a PDA we have in our pocket.”
No one denies that experiments are as important as simulations – “equal partners, in fact,” says Julia Phillips, director of Sandia’s Physical, Chemical, and Nanosciences Center.
But the Labs’ current abilities to run simulations with thousands, millions, and even billions of atoms have led to insights that would otherwise not have occurred, Fang says.
For example, one simulation demonstrated that a tiny but significant amount of material had transferred onto the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) as it examined the surface of a microsystem.
“The probe tip changed something very, very tiny on the surface of the material,” says Fang. “It was almost not noticeable. But the property of the surface became very different.”
Laboratory observation couldn’t identify the cause of the property change, but computer simulations provided a reasonable explanation of the results.
As for predicting the reliability of materials that coat surfaces, Fang says, “We find that when we compare our simulation models with data from the experiments, we get a more complete understanding.”
Says Sandia Fellow and materials researcher Jeff Brinker, “We use simulations quite a bit in support of Sandia’s water purification program and the NIH Nano-Medicine Center program. In all these cases I’m working with theorists and modelers to guide the design of synthetic nanopores so as to develop transport behaviors approaching those of natural water or ion channels that exist in cell membranes.”
Read more at Sandia NL press office…
USA Today, bastion of high quality journalism, has an uncharacteristically well written article about the controversy surrounding waived consent clinical trials used for trauma medgadgets. Specifically, they focus on the success of blood substitute PolyHeme (from Northfield Laboratories) and the failure of the AutoPulse (from ZOLL Medical) trial…
With waived-consent studies becoming more prevalent, critics question whether the public understands how they work and whether test subjects get adequate protection…
But another trial, which is reported in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was halted because a device called the AutoPulse, which was used to revive cardiac-arrest victims, failed to save more lives than when rescuers performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
According to the study, as many as 10 people in one city may not have been revived because of their participation. The JAMA study does not identify the city. But doctors have identified the site as Seattle – which has one of the highest resuscitation rates in the nation – in discussions at medical meetings since the AutoPulse trial was halted in March 2005.
Patients in these types of studies – often financed by manufacturers of the tested product – are treated under a broad federal rule that allows researchers to test emergency treatments on patients with specific, life-threatening medical conditions without their explicit consent as long as they remain under close watch of independent reviewers.
Federal officials and medical researchers say there is no substitute for this testing of emergency treatments for the leading causes of death: trauma and cardiac arrest, which claim hundreds of thousands of lives in the USA each year. To the researchers, studies with negative findings are as important as successful trials in their search for the best treatments…
Federal officials say such research is key because emergency treatments are largely untested. “Many of the treatments that are currently used in life-threatening circumstances have not been formally studied,” says Sara Goldkind, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bioethicist. “They have not come to be standard-of-care based upon rigorous scientific data.”
Doctors agree. “The only way to make any sort of significant advance in this final frontier is to perform these studies with waiver of informed consent,” says Martin Croce, a Memphis trauma surgeon. “It’s clear that multiple cascades of bad physiologic things happen shortly after injury. Once that snowball begins to roll down the hill, it’s very difficult to stop. To stop it, you need to intervene early. That is at the scene.”
Critics say the trials are conducted on a slippery ethical slope.
“It has to be done carefully,” says Nancy King, a University of North Carolina ethicist who says corporate sponsors of trials don’t always want to make key study information public. “It is so terribly easy to cut corners and say this doesn’t matter as much and we will just put some notices in the newspaper. It makes me concerned.”
The article goes on from there and is worth reading in it’s entirety. The debate hinges on whether the trial denies patients access to existing standards of care. Williams certainly would have died en route to the hospital without PolyHeme. However, once there (in the presence of transfusable blood), was it appropriate to continue the PolyHeme Infusion?
More from USA Today…
