He worries more about gremlins that plague today's reverse osmosis membranes--growths on membrane surfaces that clog them (called"biofouling)
leading to the rapid synthesis of drug derivatives for treating Parkinson's disease. Nagoya, Japan-Yutaro Saito, Yasutomo Segawa and Professor Kenichiro Itami at the Institute of Transformative Biomolecules (ITBM
"displays the development of a powerful synthetic method that enables rapid access to para-functionalized benzene derivatives to construct libraries of bioactive compounds that are useful in medicinal chemistry.
which is an anticholinergic drug used in the treatment of Parkinson's disease.''Parachuting'boron onto the para-position of a benzene ring by a bulky iridium catalyst.
Caramiphen, an anticholinergic agent used for the treatment of Parkinson's disease contains a monosubstituted benzene moiety along with ester and amine groups.
In the medical field, the substance has shown activity against cancer cell lines. In cosmetics, people appreciate the good smell, in soft drinks a fine, subtle taste.
Thanks to this substance malaria is curable. Unfortunately, it could be found only in tiny quantities in the sweet wormwood-until the US researcher Jay Keasling was able to transfer the appropriate production route from the plant in bacteria.
#A new sunblock that doesn't penetrate the skin Most commercial sunblocks are good at preventing sunburn,
the researchers tested their sunblock against direct ultraviolet rays and their ability to cause sunburn.
the researchers formulation protected equally well against sunburn. They also looked at an indirect and much less studied effect of UV LIGHT.
said co-author Michael Girardi, a professor of dermatology at Yale Medical school. In fact, the indirect damage was worse
#Brain Friendly Interface Could Change the Way People with Spinal cord Injuries Lead Their Lives Recent research published in the journal Microsystems
and spinal cord injury lead their lives. Instead of using neural prosthetic deviceshich suffer from immune-system rejection
helping people living with limb loss and spinal cord injury become more independent. However not only do neural prosthetic devices suffer from immune-system rejection,
this same methodology could then be applied in getting these extracellular matrix derived electrodes to be the next wave of brain implants,
There is a significant burden in cost of care and quality of life for people suffering from this disability.
Further, it rendered the implants sufficiently rigid for penetration into the target brain region and allowed them subsequently to soften to match the elastic modulus of brain tissue upon exposure to physiological conditions,
#Oxytocin Delivering Nasal Device to Treat Mental illness Researchers at the University of Oslo have tested a new device for delivering hormone treatments for mental illness through the nose.
This method was found to deliver medicine to the brain with few side effects. About one out of every hundred Norwegians develop schizophrenia or autism in the course of their lifetime.
Moreover, at any one time some 20,000 people are receiving treatment for these problems. Many psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are characterised by poor social functioning.
Oxytocin is a hormone that influences social behaviour and has shown promise for the treatment of mental illness.
Researchers at Uio have discovered now that low doses of oxytocin may help patients with mental illness to better perceive social signals.
As part of this project, they have collaborated with the company Optinose, who have developed a new device designed to improve medicine delivery to the brain via the nose.
Regulates social behaviouroxytocin has historically been known to play a crucial role in child rearing as it facilitates pregnancy, birth,
Medicine through the nosebecause of oxytocin role in social behaviour, researchers have explored the possibility of administering the hormone for the treatment of mental illness.
Breathing helpsoptinose uses a new technology to distribute medicine to the brain, making use of the user breath to propel medicine deep into the nasal cavity.
The device administers oxytocin high up into the patient nasal cavity. When the medicine is targeted deep inside the nose,
it enables brain delivery along nerve pathways from the uppermost part of the nasal cavity. Conventional nasal spray devices are suited not to consistently deliver medicine high up enough into the nose.
The device also expands the nasal cavity, facilitating nose-to-brain medicine delivery. As the user exhales into the device,
this closes the soft palate and prevents the medicine from being lost down the throat. Since less medicine is lost along the way
patients can take smaller doses and accordingly experience fewer side effects. May yield new treatmentsthe next step in the research is to carry out the same tests on people with mental illness. e are now running tests in volunteers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders,
says Dr Quintana. e hope that this research project is the first step in the development of a series of new medicines that may be of great help to more people with mental illness,
concludes Professor Andreassen. Funding: The research was supported in part by the Indiana State department of Health (Grant#204200 to RS), National institutes of health (Grant#NS073636 to RS),
and Indiana CTSI Collaboration in Biomedical Translational Research Pilot program Grant (Grant#RR025761 to RS). Funding for the LSM710 was provided by NIH NCRR Shared instrumentation Grant 1 S10 RR023734-01a1.
Source: Thomas Olafsen Uioimage Source: The image is credited to Uiooriginal Research: Full open access research for ow-dose oxytocin delivered intranasally with Breath Powered device affects social-cognitive behavior:
L Poppy, H Smevik, M Tesli, M Røine, R A Mahmoud, K T Smerud, P G Djupesland and O A Andreassen in Translational Psychiatry.
L Poppy, H Smevik, M Tesli, M Røine, R A Mahmoud, K T Smerud, P G Djupesland and O A Andreassen in Translational Psychiatry.
The new imaging method could make future medical applications more cost-effective and space-efficient than is possible with today technologies.
The researchers say that their technology is articularly interesting for medical applications as it can distinguish between differences in tissue density.
Cancer tissue, for example, is less dense than healthy tissue. The method therefore opens up the prospect of detecting tumors that are less than 1mm in diameter in an early stage of growth before they spread through the body
and exert their lethal effect. For this purpose however, researchers must shorten the wavelength of the X-rays even further
and medicine, bringing them better quality of life,""says Toledo Flores. The project was presented at the International Congress of Solar energy at Germany y
The KAHA ligation uses special types of organic molecules to form new bonds without the usual need for toxic chemical reagents.
What's more, they have demonstrated the practicality of this approach by identifying a novel molecule that blocks a key enzyme used by the hepatitis C virus."Our dream is to provide a do-it-yourself method--one that can be applied by anyone,
a farmer could identify a novel combination that treats plant infections. He adds that the next step is to determine the most efficient way to screen the thousands
odors nor toxic elements that may damage or alter the environment, human health or quality of life are generated,
the results show that the pyrolysis of manure waste has other additional environmental benefits such as reduced soil nutrient leaching and less waste volume, removal of odor and pathogens of the original material.
and serve a greater number of silos with the same ozonation system providing great versatility in removing pathogens from stored grain.
or leaving toxic residues, eliminating odors, fungi and sanitizing grains such as corn, beans, wheat, sorghum and rice,"says researcher Llanes Ocaña.
which are toxic and carcinogenic. The physicochemical expert explains that the common spraying method is used in doses of four tablets of phosphine per ton of grain."
#Lung'filtering'technique can reduce transplant rejection Lung transplantation is often the only option for patients with end stage lung disease,
When waiting list patients are lucky enough to receive a transplant, they need lifelong immunosuppression to prevent their own immune system from destroying the transplanted organ, a process called acute rejection.
This can repair an organ that would normally be turned down for transplant. Given that 80%of donor lungs are used currently not,
Dr James Fildes, from the University's Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research and the Transplant Centre at the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust, led the study.
"Because the lung is a potential entry route for infection into the body, its immune response is developed highly.
"All of this makes lung transplant recipients particularly susceptible to rejection, so they require continuous immunosuppression,
which then increases the risk of infection and cancer. These immune processes are therefore very important and contribute to the outlook where only five out of ten patients will survive for at least five years."
and transplanted them either using the normal transplant method or after three hours of EVLP,
whereas in the normal transplant method, all the lungs showed signs of severe rejection. EVLP is becoming an established technique,
"EVLP opens up new possibilities in one of the most problematic areas of surgery.""Patricia Moore, 63, from Oswestry was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2011 and received a transplant in 2014.
She said:""The side-effects of immunosuppression are potentially unpleasant and the thought of the associated bronchoscopy terrifies me.
but more information about the microbiome is needed to effectively design such therapies.""The paper's lead author is Hiroki Ando, an MIT research scientist.
but efforts to harness them for medical use have been hampered because isolating useful phages from soil
"We aim to create effective and narrow-spectrum methods for targeting pathogens.""Lu and his colleagues are now designing phages that can target other strains of harmful bacteria,
as well as treating human disease. Another advantage of this approach is that all of the phages are based on an identical genetic scaffold,
diseases and higher temperatures and droughts expected to accompany climate change. Cotton growers have experienced a plateau in yields since the early 1990s
and breeders in the years ahead develop cotton varieties with improved fiber qualities, higher yields and more tolerance to heat, drought and diseases anticipated due to climate change.
#Ebola Vaccine Demonstrates 100%Protection in Latest African Trial According to an unusual new study, published last week in the world most prestigious medical journal Lancet, the deadly outbreak
might finally come to an end a vaccine, developed by the Public health Agency of Canada and manufactured by the American pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dome, was shown just to confer 100%protection against the disease,
starting mere 10 days after receiving a single shot. One of the two currently-tested Ebola vaccines has been shown in a recent trial to provide 100%protection against the disease
starting just 10 days after receiving a single shot. Image credit: Julien Harneis via flickr. com, CC BY-SA 2. 0. his will go down in history as one of those hallmark public health efforts,
said Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious disease Research and Policy in Twin cities, Minnesota,
who wasn involved in the study. e will teach about this in public health schools. he vaccine,
which consists of the Vesicular stomatitis virus (pathogenic in livestock, but harmless in humans) with the Ebola surface protein stitched onto it,
the researchers opted for a design called ring vaccination, whereby only the contacts, and the contactscontacts, of new Ebola patients were vaccinated.
This type of approach has never been used in a formal vaccine study ever before. The rings, also called clusters, were randomized such that 48 of them received the vaccine right after a new Ebola case sprung up in their community,
while the other 42 received a shot only three weeks afterwards. Of the 2, 380 people who were assigned to the latter group,
16 got infected. In the second group consisting of 2 014 people the count of new Ebola cases was zero,
The Director-General of THE WHO Margaret Chan called for further studies to clear up any lingering doubts about the vaccine efficacy,
while current statistics on the epidemic are the most promising in well over a year last week only four new cases were observed in Guinea
Microfluidic cell sorting is revolutionary for the fields of cell biology and immunology, as well as other fields in biology, in concomitantly overcoming all of these obstacles.
#Researchers Smash Records with Pig-to-Primate Organ transplants With the financial aid of a biotechnology executive whose daughter may need a lung transplant,
or between-species organ transplants. The researchers say they have kept a pig heart alive in a baboon for 945 days
Virginia, by Revivicor, a division of the biotechnology company United Therapeutics. That company founder and co-CEO, Martine Rothblatt, is noted a futurist who four years ago began spending millions to supply researchers with pig organs
Rothblatt says her goal is to create n unlimited supply of transplantable organsand to carry out the first successful pig-to-human lung transplant within a few years.
One of her daughters has a usually fatal lung condition called pulmonary arterial hypertension. In addition to GM pigs, her company is carrying out research on tissue-engineered lungs and cryopreservation of organs. ee turning xenotransplantation from
Some researchers agree with Rothblatt that the latest results mean pig-to-human transplants are plausible. think it possible;
a Swiss transplant surgeon in Geneva. He said he would transplant a genetically engineered pig organ into a patient today,
In fact, thousands of people die each year while waiting on transplant lists. Donated human organs are scarce,
complete with a surgical theater and a helipad so organs can be whisked where they are needed.
The last time a doctor transplanted a pig heart into a person, in India in 1996,
leading transplant surgeons have been meeting with Revivicor ever few months to plan what genes they like to see added next.
or 100 iterations. et surgeons credit the genetically enhanced pigs with some recent successes. Muhammad Mohiuddin,
a transplant surgeon and researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, says a heart from one of Revivicor pigs lasted two and a half years inside a baboon.
achieved by Massachusetts General Hospital. Also this summer, transplant experts at the University of Pittsburgh said they kept a baboon alive with one of Revivicor pig kidneys for more than four months.
The heart transplants were not life-sustaining but eterotopic? the pig heart was attached to the baboon circulatory system
when a transplant into humans could occur. That is because surgeons still need to completely replace a baboon heart with one from these pigs
and show it keeps the animal alive. t wouldn be serious to give a time line for use in humans,
Lung transplants will be harder, since lungs are permeated with blood vessels and heavily exposed to the immune system.
So far, transplants last only a matter of days, says Rothblatt. She has been financing research at the University of Maryland,
but lungs are very difficult. ransplant surgeons say one of the largest obstacles they face is the immense cost of carrying out xenotransplant experiments.
A single transplant surgery costs $100, 000 and involves eight people. Then there the cost of keeping the primates, the red tape of animal regulations,
#Transplant Surgeons Revive Hearts After Death Transplant surgeons have started using a device that allows them to eanimatehearts from people who have died recently,
Doctors say it may extend the time a heart can last outside the body and is letting them recover hearts from donors who haven been eligible before.
In at least 15 cases, surgeons in the United kingdom and Australia say they have used the system to successfully transplant hearts removed from patients after theye died.
heart transplants only come from brain dead donors whose hearts are cut away while their bodies are still healthy.
and 30 percent, say doctors, saving the lives of people who would otherwise die from heart failure.
In the U s. about 2, 400 heart transplant occur each year, a figure that has remained essentially unchanged for 20 years.
surgeons at St vincent Hospital in New south wales described three cases in which they waited as little as two minutes after a person heart stopped before they began removing it.
Without such help, surgeons consider hearts from dead donors too damaged to use. he device is vital.
says Stephen Large, a surgeon at Papworth Hospital in the United kingdom, which has used the system as part of eight heart transplants.
Transplant surgeons recognize two major categories of death. People can be brain dead, or they die
because the heart and blood flow stop. The latter is what they now call irculatory death.
a transplant surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital. arm is the way to go with metabolically active tissue. everal small companies are working on warm perfusion machines,
Right now, most people on the liver transplant list die waiting. hen the number of organs wee talking about is huge. he first successful heart transplant,
But surgeons found that hearts that stop naturally often didn start again, or can pump blood,
says Large, the Papworth surgeon. The crisis is particularly severe in the U k, . where handguns and some other firearms are prohibited,
Donors at the Papworth hospital have included victims of car accidents and failed suicide attempts by hanging.
They had severe brain damage but were not brain dead. These patients are usually on mechanical ventilators and some,
the ethical dilemma is how long surgeons should wait before swooping in to retrieve organs. In the U s.,the accepted standard is five minutes,
although Colorado surgeons in 2008 took hearts from brain-damaged newborns after waiting only 75 seconds.
Robert Truog, a medical ethicist at Harvard university, says a question is whether these donors are given really dead
and I would say they are not. arge hospital, in a rural area a half hour drive from Cambridge, has taken some new and even more radical steps,
All eight transplants so far have been successful he says. One patient was identified publicly as Huseyin Ulucan, a 60-year-old from London t
The plasma is sustained by the injection of high-energy particles from accelerators. The challenge for Tri Alpha design, says Binderbauer,
In addition to being a step in the right direction for eventual lab-grown kidneys for transplant, the structures could help scientists screen drugs for toxicity and model normal and diseased kidney function,
the authors argue in Nature today (October 7). ) t not a kidney, it a kidney model
#Tadpole endoscope offers new hope for gastrointestinal cancer detection 14 september 2015 By Stuart Nathan The problem of looking at the inside of the body is a pressing one for doctors,
Cancers in this system the oesophagus, stomach, intestines and rectum are major causes of death and difficult to investigate,
and endoscopy, where a similar system goes in the other end are so unpleasant and traumatic for the patient.
and send pictures back to doctors isn a new one: indeed, so-called capsule endoscopy currently the best way to get pictures of the intestines between the stomach and colorectal system, the boundary zone between gastroscopy and endoscopy.
But it isn without drawbacks: The speed of transport through the system, from muscular ripples along the intestines called peristalsis can vary widely from person to person;
it can be difficult to determine precisely where lesions and growths are, because of mismatches between imaging speed and peristalsis,
This is where the tadpole comes in, with researchers Yong Zhong and Ruxu Du from the Institute of Precision Engineering and Philip W Y Chiu of the Jockey club Minimally Invasive Surgery Training Centre,
both at the Chinese University of Hong kong, attempting to mimic the movement of the larval amphibians to design a capsule endoscope with a controllable swimming action that doctors can steer around inside the stomach to provide a guided tour,
returning to the hospital the following day for the clinician to retrieve images from the pad. uture works include optimising the system model
July 28, 2015-If you are a regular reader of this blog then you have read about the importance of our research into stem cells and their therapeutic value.
For this purpose the KIT scientists established a pilot plant at the hospital of Wonosari There bacteria in the water are reduced among others by UV radiation
and hence are suited mainly for urban facilities such as schools and hospitals. In the villages where power is need lacking we much simpler technologies Obst says.
By a pipeline system fecal sludge of the hospital enters a two-stage unaerobic reactor where it is mixed with biowaste.
It is used then for the gas stoves in the kitchen of the hospital. The remaining solid is applied as a fertilizer on the fields in the vicinity.
#Bioinspired coating for medical devices repels blood, bacteria From joint replacements to cardiac implants and dialysis machines medical devices enhance
or save lives on a daily basis . However any device implanted in the body or in contact with flowing blood faces two critical challenges that can threaten the life of the patient the device is meant to help:
blood clotting and bacterial infection. A team of Harvard scientists and engineers may have a solution. They developed a new surface coating for medical devices using materials already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA.
The coating repelled blood from more than 20 medically relevant substrates the team tested--made of plastic to glass
But that's not All the team implanted medical-grade tubing and catheters coated with the material in large blood vessels in pigs
Heparin is notorious for causing potentially lethal side-effects like excessive bleeding but is often a necessary evil in medical treatments where clotting is a risk.
Devising a way to prevent blood clotting without using anticoagulants is one of the holy grails in medicine said Don Ingber M d Ph d. Founding Director of Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and senior author of the study.
Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical school and Boston Children's Hospital as well as professor of bioengineering at Harvard School of engineering and Applied sciences (SEAS.
The idea for the coating evolved from SLIPS a pioneering surface technology developed by coauthor Joanna Aizenberg Ph d. who is a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials science at Harvard SEAS.
whereas medical surfaces are mostly flat and smooth --so we further adapted our approach by capitalizing on the natural roughness of chemically modified surfaces of medical devices said Aizenberg who leads the Wyss Institute's Adaptive Materials platform.
This is yet another incarnation of the highly customizable SLIPS platform that can be designed to create slippery nonadhesive surfaces on any material.
The Wyss team developed a super-repellent coating that can be adhered to existing approved medical devices.
which is used widely in medicine for applications such as liquid ventilation for infants with breathing challenges blood substitution eye surgery and more.
While most of the team's demonstrations were performed on medical devices such as catheters and perfusion tubing using relatively simple setups they say there is a lot more on the horizon.
We feel this is just the beginning of how we might test this for use in the clinic said co-lead author Daniel Leslie Ph d. a Wyss Institute Staff Scientist who aims to test it on more complex systems such as dialysis machines
Reflecting the strong collaborative model of the Wyss Institute the cross-disciplinary team included researchers representing the Wyss Institute SEAS Harvard Medical school and Boston Children's Hospital
whose specialties range from hematology to immunology surface chemistry and materials science. This really could only happen in a place like the Wyss Institute Ingber said.
What emerged could become a new paradigm for implantable medical devices extracorporeal circuits and more. Story Source:
The ability to mold inorganic nanoparticles out of materials such as gold and silver in precisely designed 3d shapes is a significant breakthrough that has the potential to advance laser technology microscopy solar cells electronics environmental testing disease
These coatings can also help scientists develop highly sensitive multiplex methods of detecting early-stage cancers
and genetic diseases by combining the chemical specificity of the DNA with the signal readout of the metal.
This capability should open up entirely new strategies for fields ranging from computer miniaturization to energy and pathogen detection.
#Smallest world record has ndless possibilitiesfor bionanotechnology Scientists from the University of Leeds have taken a crucial step forward in bionanotechnology a field that uses biology to develop new tools for science technology and medicine.
and to aid our understanding of a range of diseases, "explained Evans. Aside from biological applications,
or to create artificial noses for the early detection of disease or simply to advise you that the milk in your fridge has gone off."
because they have a large amount of crop pathogen. However this species has other subspecies that does not harm their host plants
and treat human waste result in serious health problems and death--food and water tainted with pathogens from fecal matter results in the deaths of roughly 700000 children each year.
Linden's team is one of 16 around the world funded by the Gates Reinvent the Toilet Challenge since 2011.
and transferred to the fiber-optic cable system--similar in some ways to a data transmission line--can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine and produce char.
-or right-handed form may have a multitude of practical applications, potentially leading to new and improved drugs, diagnosis methods, and pesticides.
The breakthrough could be important in developing effective molecules for use in a wide range of industries everything from the development of safer new drugs and disease diagnosis to less toxic pesticides.
for instance the well-known malformation of the limbs of infants of pregnant women taking the Thalidomide drug to relieve morning sickness that occurred around 1960.
In addition to the development of effective new drugs and diagnosis methods for diseases including cancer, it could potentially lead to new reenpesticides using pheromones tailored specifically to attract pollinators
and trees when under stress and detectors to identify concentrations in air samples could be used to monitor our changing ecology.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011