Arteriocyte, from Cleveland, Ohio, has sent an initial shipment of their pharmed blood product to the FDA for evaluation. Issues with storage, transportation and safety provided an incentive to search for alternatives to donated blood for use on the battlefield. Under a $1.95 million contract with the Pentagon’s DARPA project, the company has developed a process to produce fresh units of universal-donor (type O, Rhesus factor negative) packed red blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells. Although this has been possible on a small scale for many years, the main challenge is implementing this process on production-scale. The technology, which the company calls NANEX, permits 250-fold expansion of hematopoietic stem cells that are subsequently cultured in a unique environment of nutrients and growth factor to induce differentiation into enucleated red blood cells. The company is working on improving the production process, as one unit of pharmed blood currently costs $5,000 to produce. To make economical sense to use arteriocyte instead of donated blood, a unit will have to cost less than $1,000. Human trials aren’t expected until 2013.
More at Wired: Wired: Darpa’s Lab-Grown Blood Starts Pumping…
Company website: Arteriocyte…
Military Medicine Archives
Arteriocyte’s Pharmed Blood Ready to be Evaluated by FDA
Games for Health 2010: Military TC3 Simulator Trains, Entertains Medics
Medics in the Marine Corps and Navy have a new way to train with the Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TC3) simulator developed by Engineering & Computer Simulations of Orlando, Florida. The simulator complements course training in reinforcing the lessons learned.
The simulator puts the user in the shoes of a medic in Afghanistan and presents various scenarios from a first-person perspective. In the demonstration, the medic was following behind his team when they came under attack. The threat was neutralized, at which point the user had to come in to survey the scene. One man was spurting blood rather alarmingly from his neck. A pressure dressing was applied, and after checking his pulse an IV was started. The next patient had a traumatic amputation of his forearms and was screaming and writhing in pain. After some calming words from the the user, the patient calmed down and a tourniquet was applied. Eventually, after all friendly and enemy combatants were accounted for and somewhat stable transport was called in, the mission ended.
Partnership to Develop Smart Helmet Monitoring To Prevent Overheating
Coming to a local football game near you, HotHead smart helmets with remote sensing will soon be able to help coaches yank overheated athletes off the field before their heads explode. Hothead Technologies out of Atlanta, GA is partnering with Sivix Logistics to adapt Sivix’s key fob (a data encryption hardware unit) and associated sensor monitoring module to Hothead’s lineup of heat sensing safety devices. Skin temperature readings from a heat sensor embedded inside the helmet of an athlete, firefighter, soldier, or other wearer are collected and transmitted to a remote, portable device of a coach or other monitoring personnel.
From the press release:
Pentagon Seeks to Repair Brains with Optogenetic Implants
DARPA is stimulating the development of implantable therapies for brain trauma with $14.9M of federal funding towards optogenetics research. Led by optogenetics pioneer Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, the REPAIR research team will study the response of neural microcircuits to injury and develop implantable optogenetic microdevices that may help the brain restore function.
A highly-specific type of neuromodulation, optogenetics can switch neural activity on and off with a small implanted device that delivers green and yellow laser signals via fiber optics onto their respective light-sensitive genes, channelrhodopsin 2 (ChR2) and halorhodopsin (NpHR). Optogenetic signals are highly discriminant, unlike current deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapies, and pulses at the frequency at which neurons operate. The genetically-engineered cells in turn regulate the activity of specific neural circuits, such as those that play a role in Parkinson’s, blindness, spinal injury, narcolepsy, addiction, and memory.
SonarMed Airway Monitoring System Gets Green Light in US
Sonarmed out of Indianapolis, Indiana has received FDA clearance to market the company’s Airway Monitoring System (AMS), a device that uses ultrasound reflectometry to track the position of the endotracheal tube and continuously assesses it for patency. The system can supposedly alert clinicians if the ET tube has an obstruction, whether it is due to mucus plugs, tube advancement, or a kink. The company believes that its technology may “reduce sometimes-unnecessary medical procedures routinely performed during airway management (such as chest x-rays and suctioning) which may reduce associated costs and risks (for example, radiation exposure).”
From the product page:
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ABORhCard Credit Card-Sized Blood Group Determinator
Micronics of Redmond, Washington has gained FDA clearance for marketing its ABORhCard, a credit card-sized device that determines blood group and Rhesus factor status. The card contains anti-A, anti-B and anti-D antibodies printed into discrete microfluidic channels. The device gives fast results, within minutes, and can be stored at room temperature. However a buffer needs to be added after storage to rehydrate the antibodies. It was developed with help of funding by the U.S. army for use in battlefield and emergency situations. However, for now the device is marketed for personal educational and informational purposes only, as it has not been cleared for medical use.
Press release: Micronics Receives 510(k) Clearance to Market ABORhCard for Blood Group Determination…
Futuristic Undies Monitor Your Secretions
Finally, after an evolutionary plateau that would raise the metaphorical eyebrow of an amphibious reptile, the future of underwear is here. Researchers in the US and Taiwan have been hard at work developing wearable amperometric biosensors that can be printed onto clothing and could one day find their way into your underpants. As a proof-of-concept, the team developed sensors for the detection of NADH and H2O2. They found that their new biosensors, which were printed on the elastic waistband of men’s underwear, were able to withstand the deformatory forces typically endured by clothing. In the future, the researchers plan to develop sensors enabling the detection of other substances such as lactate and ethanol. The technology could greatly assist in monitoring certain biochemical parameters in patients outside the hospital, and may also find application in sports and the military.
Full text in journal Analyst: Thick-film textile-based amperometric sensors and biosensors…
MEDUMAT Easy CPR, an Emergency Ventilator with a Guiding Voice
German manufacturer Weinmann Geräte für Medizin GmbH + Co. KG, colloquially known as Weinmann, has created a portable voice-guided ventilator optimized for EMR and military personnel performing cardiopulmonary resuscitations in the field.
When you are carrying out life-saving measures, MEDUMAT Easy CPR operating in CPR mode supplies you with unmistakable spoken instructions and gives you the right timing of chest compressions with the help of its metronome. The ventilator also lets you manually generate a ventilated breath by activating MEDUtrigger on the mask. With the timing of the ventilated breath under your control, MEDUMAT Easy CPR can be integrated perfectly in the CPR process.
S-CUT Slices Through Clothes, Belts, Zippers for Quick Access to Patient
Ivor Kovic, our former editor and an ER doc in Croatia, has been very fond of a new clothes removal tool his ambulance service has been using in the last few months. Ivor says that the S-CUT is faster than any scissors and it can slice just about any normal clothing people wear on a daily basis.
From the product page:
