Archives: 3/2008

Medicine

NicVAX, a Nicotine Smoking Cessation Vaccine

by Gene Ostrovsky on Mar 14, 2008 • 8:01 am

453nic NicVAX, a Nicotine Smoking Cessation Vaccine
The 2008 Frost & Sullivan Product Innovation Award for the U.S. Smoking Cessation Market went to Nabi Biopharmaceuticals, a Rockville, Maryland company, for its innovative and promising NicVAX® nicotine fighting vaccine. The company believes that it has developed a conjugate vaccine technology that allows the organism to develop immunologic response that would prevent the nicotine from crossing the blood brain barrier. Hence your beloved immunized tobacco abuser/nicotine addict would not get his usual high for many many months.
453nic2 NicVAX, a Nicotine Smoking Cessation VaccineThe company explains:

Nicotine is a small molecule that upon inhalation into the body quickly passes into the bloodstream and subsequently reaches the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier. Once in the brain, the nicotine binds to specific nicotine receptors, which results in the release of stimulants, such as dopamine, providing the smoker with a positive sensation, which causes addiction. NicVAX is designed to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies that bind to nicotine in the bloodstream and prevent it from crossing the blood-brain barrier and entering the brain. Therefore, the brain does not produce the positive-sensation stimulants as a response to nicotine. Pre-clinical animal studies with NicVAX have shown that vaccination could prevent nicotine from reaching the brain blocking the effects of nicotine, including effects that can lead to addiction or can reinforce and maintain addiction.
Nicotine addiction is difficult to treat effectively. We believe NicVAX has advantages over existing treatment therapies because its effect is irreversible for potentially six to 12 months following vaccination as antibodies to nicotine continue to be produced by the body’s immune system. This is important due to the extremely high relapse rate that has been observed when a smoker attempts to quit smoking. Currently, smokers being treated for nicotine addiction can stop using their therapy and resume their addiction.
In September 2005, we were awarded a $4.1 million grant by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, partially offsetting our funding requirements for the NicVAX development program.

Back in Sept. 2007, the company reported positive results from Phase 2b of the trial of NicVAX vaccine at nine months.
Product page: NicVAX® (Nicotine Conjugate Vaccine)…
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards…

in the news... / Sports Medicine / Surgery

Femtosecond Lazers: Killing Cancer & Fusing Metal to Bone

by Josh Umbehr on Mar 14, 2008 • 7:40 am

46534laz Femtosecond Lazers: Killing Cancer & Fusing Metal to BoneUniversity of Missouri scientists are working to bring functional femtosecond lasers [as in beams] out of the real of sci-fi and into the real world of medicine. Lead researcher, and professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Robert Tzou explains how this new technology could revolutionize everything from dentistry to oncology to joint replacement surgery.

What makes the femtosecond laser different from other lasers is its unique capacity to interact with its target without transferring heat to the area surrounding its mark. The intensity of the power gets the job done while the speed ensures heat does not spread. Results are clean cuts, strong welds and precision destruction of very small targets, such as cancer cells, with no injury to surrounding materials. Tzou hopes that the laser would essentially eliminate the need for harmful chemical therapy used in cancer treatments.
“If we have a way to use the lasers to kill cancer cells without even touching the surrounding healthy cells, that is a tremendous benefit to the patient,” Tzou said. “Basically, the patient leaves the clinic immediately after treatment with no side effects or damage. The high precision and high efficiency of the UUL allows for immediate results.”
Practical applications of this type of laser also include, but aren’t limited to, the ability to create super-clean channels in a silicon chip. [Ed note: we can think of more applications later...] That process can allow doctors to analyze blood one cell at a time as cells flow through the channel. The laser can be used in surgery to make more precise incisions that heal faster and cause less collateral tissue damage. In dentistry, the laser can treat tooth decay without harming the rest of the tooth structure.
Associate Professor Yuwen Zhang and Professor Jinn-Kuen Chen recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to use the laser to “sinter” metal powders—turn them into a solid, yet porous, mass using heat but without massive liquefaction—a process which can help improve the bond between joint implants and bone.
“With the laser, we can melt a very thin strip around titanium micro- and nanoparticles and ultimately control the porosity of the bridge connecting the bone and the alloy,” Zhang said. “The procedure allows the particles to bond strongly, conforming to the two different surfaces.”

Press Release…
(hat tip: Gizmodo)

Neurology

A Voiceless Way to Speak

by Justin Barad on Mar 14, 2008 • 12:54 am


Why waste all that energy talking on the phone when you can just think on the phone?
We reported on Ambient’s Audeo back in Sep. 2007. It is a device worn on the neck that reads signals sent to the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which controls the vocal cords. The Audeo was marketed then as a means to control a wheelchair by thinking about saying certain instructions.
Now the Audeo has been adapted for thought-to-speech purposes. It is hoped that those who are unable to communicate vocally, such as patients with ALS, will benefit. The device can recognize about 150 words and phrases. Hopefully the delay between “thinking about speaking” and actual speech production can be improved.
One needs to be thinking really hard to activate the device, so there’s no need to worry about the Audeo screaming out your opinion at that annoying boss who wears way too much cologne.
Read more here…
(Hat tip: Engadget)

Radiology

ddRCompact from Swissray Takes Frost & Sullivan Award

by Gene Ostrovsky on Mar 14, 2008 • 12:00 am

4634ddr ddRCompact from Swissray Takes Frost & Sullivan Award
Swissray International, Inc. is the recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s 2008 North American Single Detector Digital Radiography Product Innovation of the Year Award for its cost effective line of high-quality digital radiography systems, the ddRCompact™ series.
The following is from the statement by Frost & Sullivan:

Combined with world renowned Swiss Engineering, the ddRCompact series increases patient throughput and overall productivity, while lowering the costs associated with imaging thus enhancing the revenues for the imaging center, all at one time, which makes it unique.
“Swissray is the only one of its kind in the digital imaging front, offering customers a detector technology choice – either amorphous silicon flat panel detectors or solid state charge couple devices systems,” says Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Pramodh Ishwarakrishnan. “The company introduced the ddRCompact series in order to provide a low-cost DR system that produces high-quality, high-resolution images, and to meet the needs and demands of low-volume imaging centers and markets such as orthopedics, smaller hospitals, veterinary and chiropractic.”
Specifically designed to accommodate the needs of modern radiography departments, the ddRCompact system employs a single High Definition Silicon Solid State Detector HD-3000™ which offers outstanding image quality at low levels of radiation in just seconds.
By utilizing a single detector, the cost incurred by imaging centers is significantly lower since the DR system investment and the maintenance costs are minimal. Swissray’s technology improves the productivity gains in a hospital and overrides the limitations of conventional and computed radiography.
The ddRCompact is based on a C-arm design, where the X-ray tube is aligned and always centered to the detector for fast, precise, and convenient patient positioning. Swissray’s unique Automated Positioning System (APS) streamlines the radiography workflow process by automating all positioning and collimation requirements. With its remote control and pre-programmed memory function, the system can be moved quickly, conveniently and precisely into the desired applications. Patient demographics are seamlessly integrated and add to enhance the efficiency of exam workflow.

Product page: ddRCompact…
Product brochure (.pdf)…
Press release: Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Swissrays Innovation and Leadership in the Design, Manufacture, and Marketing of High-tech ddR Technology…
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards…

Nanomedicine

Scientists Develop 16-bit Parallel Molecular Nanoprocessor

by Gene Ostrovsky on Mar 14, 2008 • 12:00 am

45234mot Scientists Develop 16 bit Parallel Molecular Nanoprocessor
One of the most intriguing possibilities of nanotechnology is in its ability to create molecular constructs that can work autonomously to perform specific tasks or functions. An artificial flagellum, powered by a nanomotor, attached to a vesicle loaded with drugs, delivering medications to a distant target, is our golden dream of the nanofuture. It is fair to say that scientists Anirban Bandyopadhyay and Somobrata Acharya from the International Center for Young Scientists, National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, are making our dreams more realistic. In the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they are reporting a self organizing 16-bit parallel processing molecular assembly. In essence, the processor is composed of 17 molecules of duroquinone on the surface of gold, in which the central molecule controls the other 16 through hydrogen-bond channels. As a result, the system can assume a huge (416) number of positions.
From the abstract:

A machine assembly consisting of 17 identical molecules of 2,3,5,6-tetramethyl-1–4-benzoquinone (DRQ) executes 16 instructions at a time. A single DRQ is positioned at the center of a circular ring formed by 16 other DRQs, controlling their operation in parallel through hydrogen-bond channels. Each molecule is a logic machine and generates four instructions by rotating its alkyl groups. A single instruction executed by a scanning tunneling microscope tip on the central molecule can change decisions of 16 machines simultaneously, in four billion (416) ways. This parallel communication represents a significant conceptual advance relative to today’s fastest processors, which execute only one instruction at a time.

Imagine a future where such a processor is a part of an in vivo nanopacemaker, siting right inside the AV node. Wow!
Abstract: A 16-bit parallel processing in a molecular assembly
More from MSNBC Cosmic Log…

in the news...

Medgadget Goes to 2008 Frost & Sullivan Excellence in Med Tech Awards

by Gene Ostrovsky on Mar 14, 2008 • 12:00 am

Frost & Sullivan‘s Excellence in Medical Technologies Awards is becoming a pleasant yearly affair for us (and, hopefully, it will stay this way). It is essentially the only conference that Medgadget editors unabashedly want to attend. This year’s awards banquet was once again a grand affair. Held at the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, the awards ceremony and a banquet featured some of the best and the brightest entrepreneurs of the medical devices and biotech industry. All of the companies selected for awards were rigorously analyzed and compared to their competitors by hundreds of Frost & Sullivan’s analysts from across the world. The idea is to “honor companies and individuals that have identified emerging trends before they have become the standard in the marketplace and have created advanced technologies that will catalyze industries in the near future.” Some of the firms were well known to us, while others were new wonderful discoveries. In the posts to follow, we will profile some of the winners.
We would like to thank Frost & Sullivan for giving us a chance to be there to meet the winners and for giving us an opportunity to bring these exciting emerging technologies to our readers.

in the news... / Nanomedicine

Handheld Biosensor Uses Stickly Nanotech to Capture DNA

by editors on Mar 14, 2008 • 12:00 am

34634plaz Handheld Biosensor Uses Stickly Nanotech to Capture DNAMethods to detect the presence of specific DNA molecules have been around for a long time. However, they are slow, expensive and not particularly easy to transport. Although we have heard of particularly avid scientists carrying around PCR machines in their luggage, Samuel Afuwape of National University at San Diego thinks that an ion-selective field-effect transistor might take up a bit less room in our suitcase:

Afuwape suggests that a new type of electronic device, the ion-selective field-effect transistor (ISFET), might be integrated into a DNA biosensor. Such a sensor would be coated with thousands of known DNA sequences that could match up – hybridize – with specific DNA fragments in a given medical or environmental sample.
The key to making the system work is that the ISFET can measure changes in conductivity. Constructing a sensor so that the process of DNA hybridization is coupled to a chemical reaction that generates electricity would produce discrete electronics signals. These signals would be picked up by the ISFET. The characteristic pattern of the signals would correspond to hybridization of a known DNA sequence on the sensor and so could reveal the presence of its counterpart DNA in the sample. Afuwape’s mathematical work demonstrates that various known chemical reaction circuits involving DNA could be exploited in such a sensor.
"The ISFET is proving to be a powerful platform on which to design and develop selective, sensitive, and fast miniature DNA sensors," says Afuwape, "such portable DNA sensors will find broad application in medical, agriculture, environmental and bioweapons detection."

Press Release: Handheld DNA detector
Abstract: Analytical simulation of interfacial DNA hybridisation for design of an optimal nanotechnology handheld biosensor
Image credit: Wellcome Images: Plasmid DNA on a mineral sheeet

Society

Implant Hacking Possible, Not Probable… yet

by Justin Barad on Mar 14, 2008 • 12:00 am

This is an update to our earlier post about the vulnerabilities of AICDs and pacemakers to hack attacks. Here’s what we have learned now. It is very common for implantable devices to be programmed and maintained using wireless communication. As any paranoid blogger using a wi-fi hotspot knows, wireless communication is often very insecure and easily monitored unless proper precautions are taken.
medtronic defibrillator image Implant Hacking Possible, Not Probable... yetResearchers are reporting that they were able to acquire confidential patient records from a Medtronic ICD, as well as deliver fatal shocks and shut the device down.
Manufacturers have been lax on implementing security methods in the devices because of battery drain concerns. The other points of this study suggest methods that could theoretically be used to make the devices more secure, although none of them have been tested in the field.
It is important to note that the researchers required $30,000 of lab equipment and a distance of 2 cm from the device in order to carry out the hack, so this is probably not an imminent threat to the thousands of people with these devices.
While the threat might not be imminent, Dick Cheney will probably lock himself in his man-sized safe just to be sure.
Read the NYTimes.com article here…
Read more about the study at secure-medicine.org…

Uncategorized

A Note

by Gene Ostrovsky on Mar 13, 2008 • 8:23 am

3256fs A Note
There will be no posts today. Please come back here tomorrow as we start our expanded coverage of technologies that were just recognized at the 2008 Frost & Sullivan Medical Technologies and Life Sciences Awards. Medgadget has attended the awards, and we are super excited to start our coverage. Thanks for stopping by!

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