Health generale

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Synopsis: Health: Health generale:

With common pathogens such as E coli and the pneumonia bug K. pneumoniae developing resistance to our antibiotics of last resort, leading pharmacologists, clinicians and epidemiologists say we risk being cast back to a time

when even routine surgery put Victorians at risk of fatal infection. It's no mystery

Complacent over-prescription of antibiotics by doctors, and their reckless, profligate use in livestock rearing, has provided ample opportunity for resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria to proliferate through natural selection.

Light-switchable drugs have been explored in other fields such as cancer therapy, but not for antibiotics. Organic chemist Ben Feringa at Groningen and his co-workers used an existing light-switchable unit called azobenzene,

when swallowed, they tend to attack the"friendly#bacteria in the gut as well as pathogens. Drugs equipped with activation switches could be administered orally

The growth of novel personal medical sensing technologies, many of which use Bluetooth, could soon change this.

the Scanadu Scout is described perhaps best as something approaching a real version of the medical tricorder wielded by Star trek doctor Leonard"Bones#Mccoy.

blood pressure, core body and skin temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure and emotional stress levels.

With recent advances in technology such as Bluetooth, we are now able to build medical devices that weren't possible just a decade ago#.

"For people who live far from hospitals, in places like Africa, this could be life changing.#

once embedded under the skin monitors substances in the blood such as glucose and cholesterol so that chronic diseases like diabetes or the effects of treatments such as chemotherapy can be monitored.

The raw medical data, which is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth to an Android app, can be forwarded automatically to doctors.

Bluecell is still a few years from commercialisation.""We chose Bluetooth because of its wide distribution in consumer devices,

and Monobaby, a device being developed to prevent Sudden infant death syndrome, also known as cot death, using an accelerometer attached to baby clothing.

and Oklahoma infrastructure in some states is scarce. o avoid feelings of range anxiety common in owners of CNG-only vehicles we made the Impala bi-fuel allowing our customers to drive on CNG when available and on gasoline

#Implants And Powering Them From Within Your heart expends half a joule of energy every time it beats.

you need to have surgery to replace it. Power is always a challenge. The innovation is a flexible piezoelectric layer sandwiched between biocompatible plastic.

These results, the team concluded, demonstrate that their system could power implants like pacemakers with

or without batteries. ur ultimate goal is to replace the battery of an implant altogether,

ut even extending the life of the implant own battery is useful. They grew rat smooth muscle cells on their prototypes to determine that the materials were not toxic.

and island communities around the Mediterranean are affected by water-stress problems. According to the European environment agency (EEA), 16 to 44 million additional people will suffer water scarcity in Southern Europe by 2070.

#Award-winning innovation revolutionises vaccine production A European union (EU)- funded research project has opened up a radical new era in the world of vaccine discovery and production.

Focused on veterinary vaccines, the project's work has made possible a dramatically faster and more effective route to the creation of vaccines to combat some of the most devastating diseases affecting farm livestock.

The same accelerated route can be used to uncover a vast new range of urgently-needed vaccines for humans as well.

Named PLAPROVA (Plant Production of Vaccines), the project was the successful result of an unprecedented co-funding initiative between the EU and Russia

with Russia matching the#2 million of funding provided by the EU under its 7th Framework Programme.

the PLAPROVA consortium focused on the use of plants proteins to produce vaccines against diseases such as avian flu, bluetongue, foot and mouth disease,

and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome. Plants have been used to produce pharmaceuticals in the past, but the crucial element at the heart of the three-year PLAPROVA project was a technique for doing this much more quickly than previously possible an advance

which has revolutionary implications for future vaccine production. It also helped win a major innovation award for the lead researcher.

This triggers the production of proteins which are of potential pharmaceutical interest as the basis for new vaccines.

thus opening up much wider possibilities for genuinely novel vaccines. Previously, the timescale required before results were known for just a single protein meant researchers naturally played safe and tended to produce'biosimilars'

i e. vaccines which replicated already existing ones. It was a situation which discouraged the search for new products.

when dealing with seasonal outbreaks when a vaccine needs to be created urgently, usually in a matter of months from the time the strain of disease is first indentified.

The success of PLAPROVA has generated already significant commercial interest. Discussions are in progress with vaccine manufacturers in South africa about production of a bluetongue vaccine.

And a Canadian firm, Medicago Inc, has applied successfully the technique to the discovery and production of pandemic flu vaccines for humans, on

which it has completed recently a Phase II clinical trial. The revolutionary impact of the new PLAPROVA technique

with the possibilities it opens up for future work in vaccine discovery, was recognised with the naming of Professor Lomonossoff as Innovator of the Year 2012 by the Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council (BBSRC), U s

#ACTINOGEN#Uncovering a hidden source of new antibiotics In recent years, the emergence of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria has created a major health threat, for example through hospital-acquired infections from drug

-resistant'superbugs'such as MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and the rapidly emerging multi-drug resistant Gram negative hospital infections.

It has allowed also the resurgence of'old'diseases that we thought were things of the past,

such as new strains of tuberculosis against which existing drugs are powerless. It was to meet the unaddressed need for new antibiotics that the ACTINOGEN research project began in 2005

but also for public health budgets and for the European biotechnology industry n

#FLEXPAKRENEW#Green materials for flexible packaging Over 16 million tonnes of flexible packaging are used each year across Europe.

Over the course of a two-year EU-funded research project, called Biobroom, Slovakian doctor Peter Tóth uncovered the intricate relationship between the broomrape and the broomrape fly, Phytomyza orobanchia,

#The eaves of death for malaria mosquitoes EU-funded researchers have developed three new tools to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

They are now working to bring their low-cost innovations to market quickly a boost to the global battle against this deadly disease.

Over the past two decades global efforts to prevent malaria and treat its victims have contributed to reduce infection dramatically

and save millions of lives. Even so, each year around 200 million people catch malaria, and 600 000 die from the disease, mostly children and women in Africa, according to the World health organization.

Prevention through insecticide-treated bednets and indoor sprays, is one of the best ways to win the battle.

But mosquitoes are becoming resistant to insecticides potentially reversing the gains made so far. In response, the EU-funded MCD project has developed three new weapons against them a special coating that transfers insecticides effectively to mosquitoes landing on it,

The netherlands-based research company specialises in developing products to control disease-transmitting insects. have been working in the field of malaria research for the past 22 years,

and bricks on up to 7 000 houses one that would yield solid scientific evidence that these tools can be deployed broadly to reduce the burden of malaria.

Partly because confirming the diagnosis required that epidemiologists fly from Europe to Africa collect blood samples fly back to Europe

##This could really be a game-changer for a lot of applications including diagnostics##say James Collins who is a professor of biomedical engineering and medicine at Boston University and a core faculty member at Harvard s Wyss Institute.##

A standard pregnancy test for example tests for a hormone produced when a fertilized egg implants into a women s uterus.

and scan for infection for exampleâ##synthetic gene circuits are especially useful for detecting things like contaminants pesticides heavy metals and counterfeit drugs.##

##The technology can be embedded in any porous material such as cloth potentially opening the door for wider applications says Collins. He envisions smart scrubs for health care workers that can sense exposure to a virus;

bandages that signal when a wound is infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria; or smart clothing that tells a runner she s getting dehydrated.##

and has been shown to cause cancer. Because biochar can be produced from various waste biomass including agricultural residues this new technology provides an alternative

and sarin gas Scientists are developing a way to prevent brain damage among people exposed to poisonous chemicals found in pesticides and chemical weapons.

The result is a thermo-stable protein with a longer half-life that retains all the detoxification capabilities. rganophosphates pose tremendous danger to people and wildlife,

Montclare explains that in addition to therapeutic formulations which could prevent nerve damage in the event of a gas attack

Plans are under way to begin developing therapeutic applications. Michelle Zhang a coauthor of the paper and, at the time, a high school intern in Bonneau lab, first broached the idea.

potentially minimizing dangerous side effects such as blood clots and uterine cancer. The gel was tested on women diagnosed with noninvasive cancer ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) in

which abnormal cells multiply and form a growth in a milk duct. Because of potential side effects

many women with DCIS are reluctant to take oral tamoxifen after being treated with breast-saving surgery

says lead author Seema Khan, professor of surgery and professor of cancer research at Northwestern University Feinberg School of medicine.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE or breast cancer prevention and DCIS therapy effective drug concentrations are required in the breast.

which should avoid potential blood clots as well as an elevated risk for uterine cancer. Women who have completed surgery

and radiation are given oral tamoxifen for five years to reduce the risk of the DCIS recurring at the same place

Tamoxifen is an anti-estrogen therapy for a type of breast cancer that requires estrogen to grow.

For a new study published in Clinical Cancer Research, researchers conducted a phase II clinical trial to compare the effects of the gel, 4-OHT, with oral tamoxifen.

The National Cancer Institute of the National institutes of health and BHR Pharma, LLC supported the research

#Wireless pacemaker is much smaller than a penny Engineers have built an electronic pacemaker that smaller than a grain of rice

and efficacy requirements for using this wireless charging system in commercial medical devices. But it has the potential to eliminate bulky batteries

and lead to a type of medicine where physicians treat disease and alleviate pain with electronics instead of drugs. e need to make these devices as small as possible to more easily implant them deep in the body

and create new ways to treat illness and alleviate pain, says Ada Poon, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford university.

and drug delivery systems to apply medicines directly to affected areas, Poon says. The work creates the potential to develop lectroceuticaltreatments as alternatives to drug therapies,

says William Newsome, professor of neurobiology and director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Newsome, who was involved not in Poon experiments

Either way, far-field electromagnetic waves have been ignored as a potential wireless power source for medical devices. Near-field waves can be used safely in wireless power systems.

Some current medical devices like hearing implants use near-field technology. But their limitation is implied by the name:

In the experiment, Poon used her midfield transfer system to send power directly to tiny medical implants.

we can safely transmit power to tiny implants in organs like the heart or brain,

The breakthrough of knowing where the gene pools that created your DNA were mixed last has massive implications for lifesaving personalized medicine

Medical screening Elhaik coauthor Tatiana Tatarinova developed a website making GPS accessible to the public. o help people find their roots,

an associate professor of research pediatrics at the Keck School of medicine of the University of Southern California. e were surprised by the simplicity and precision of this method.

this kind of screening has huge, important medical implications. The discovery of a certain genotype might indicate the potential for a genetic disease

and suggest that diagnostic testing be done. Also, as scientists learn more about personalized medicine, there is evidence that specific genotypes respond differently to medicationsaking this information potentially useful

when selecting the most effective therapy and appropriate dosage. The investigators are currently designing a study to correlate pharmacokineticshe time course of drug metabolismith genotype.

Additional researchers contributed to the study from Johns hopkins university University of Pennsylvania, University of Arizona, and other research institutions around the world.

and has been shown to cause cancer. ecause biochar can be produced from various waste biomass including agricultural residues this new technology provides an alternative and cost-effective way for arsenic removalsays Bin Gao associate professor of agricultural

which can run for years without needing to be wound manually. The new system works like this:

and pathogens that can have an environmental impact if not properly managed. While turning the manure into clean water makes environmental sense

For example sophisticated vintners use precise irrigation to put regulated water stress on grapevines to create just the right grape composition for a premium cabernet or a chardonnay wine.

While growers can use the sensors to monitor water in soils for their crops civil engineers can embed the chips in concrete to determine optimal moisture levels as the concrete cures. ne of our goals is to try

reduces stress, and makes the milking station less of a bottleneck because there isn't a whole herd trying to get in at the same time.

and pen of the Astronaut 4 are equipped also with sensors to detects signs of mastitis.

and it adjusts food supplements, minerals and medicines for each animal. As for the farmer, aside from filling the hoppers,

#DNATRAX tracks tainted food with molecular bar code According to the US Center for disease control (CDC) 129000 Americans are sent to hospital and 3000 die each year from food poisoning.

Food poisoning due to outbreaks is a major problem putting thousands of lives at risk wasting tons of recalled foodstuffs with US$70 billion dollars lost in the US alone each year.

We are prepared not to deal with an outbreak of pathogens such as E coli and salmonella in tainted foods.

The crisis is attributed generally to a mixture of disease, parasites, and pesticides. Other scientists are pursuing a different tack:

and even pest and disease resistance. There is potential for these multifunctional techno-greenhouses built around LED grow lights to increase the quality of the food we eat

just as mass, anonymised patient records could improve health care. But its success depends on service providers persuading users (farmers

Sensors help agriculture by enabling real-time traceability and diagnosis of crop, livestock and farm machine states.

Consumer Physics has developed three different applications for identifying food, medicines, and plants. During a short demo,

Of course, the disease-eradicating, condom-reinventing Microsoft cofounder didn actually drink human excrement Sedro-Woolley-produced sewage sludge at its finest.

#Synthetic vaccine could prevent future outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease Virologists have devised a way to create an entirely synthetic vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease.

The vaccine could prevent future outbreaks of the disease, and potentially lead to new treatments for polio and other human diseases.

Bryan Charleston, head of the Livestock Viral Diseases Programme at the Pirbright Institute in Woking, UK,

and his colleagues used computer simulations to create a model of the protein shell of the virus that causes the disease,

then reconstructed it from synthetic protein components. The synthetic shell contains no genetic material and so it cannot infect the animals.

and spurred a decision to protect against future outbreaks with vaccination rather than mass slaughter.

however a vaccine made from inactivated virus caused another UK outbreak. The authors say that there is absolutely no chance that their new vaccine could revert into an infectious virus

because it contains no viral genes. Also being entirely synthetic, it cannot be contaminated with live virus during manufacturing.

It will be 6-8 years before the vaccine is available to farmers, they estimate. But if the method used to create the vaccine proves successful when scaled to commercial production,

it could also be used to create vaccines for human diseases that are caused by viruses of the same family, such as hand, foot and mouth disease,

which is ubiquitous in Southeast asia, and polio, which still blights the lives of millions of people in the developing world."

But if we could use this to move away from inactivated polio viruses in the vaccines,

because we are so close to ending this disease. JEFF J MITCHELL/REUTERSA 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease led to the slaughter of huge numbers of sheep and cows.

Earlier attempts to produce a synthetic vaccine for foot and mouth disease were thwarted often by peculiarities of viral geometry.

The team got around the problem by engineering the vaccine to have disulphide bonds cross-linking the protein triangles together.

says John Oxford, a virologist at St bartholomew s and the Royal London Hospital.""This really is an ace paper#they've truly given the entire issue a whole new dimension,

and Charleston that the new vaccine is unable to cause an infection or outbreak. Marvin Grubman, an animal-disease researcher at the US Department of agriculture in Orient Point, New york, says that the new vaccine"is a good piece of work,

but certainly not very novel, pointing to a foot-and-mouth vaccine his team devised that uses adenovirus to deliver empty viral shells.

That vaccine, he says, has been approved for use in the United states for cases of emergency. The authors however point out that their vaccine does not require the injection of live viruses

and that it would be suitable for preventive vaccination as well as in cases of severe outbreaks o

#Gene-analysis firms reach for the cloud For Chaim Jalas at the Center for Rare Jewish Genetic disorders in New york,

DNA sequencing is the easy part. It costs less than US$1, 500 per person to have the important parts of his clients genomes sequenced.

But it would be dauntingly expensive to maintain servers and staff to analyse the data

and identify mutations that might be causing the undiagnosed diseases that afflict his clients families.

And the cloud-based interfaces let him collaborate with doctors in Israel without worrying about repeatedly transferring data on slow Internet connections."

which will be touting for customers at a meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics in Phoenix, Arizona, on 19-23 march.

as ever more affordable sequencing moves from academia into the clinic (see Nature 494,290-291; 2013).

) Doctors will increasingly want to use sequen#cing data to guide decisions about patient care, but might not necessarily want to invest in staff

and finds those most likely to cause disease. Personalis, down the road in Menlo Park, offers sequencing services and interpretation for clinicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

to explore the variants roles in disease. The company will outsource the sequencing to Illumina,

and hospitals to analyse data. But one of the biggest questions will be how deeply analysis companies can reach into medical settings,

where privacy concerns are paramount. Hospitals can be fined if patient privacy is compromised, and clinical geneticists may be uneasy about uploading data to the cloud."

"It s your licence and your lab that go on the line when it comes to reporting a clinical result,

That is a large part of why many hospitals have chosen so far to build their own analysis infrastructure,

#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.

The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.

the surgery bot will perform a set of exercises to demonstrate its dexterity, such as manipulating rubber bands and other inanimate objects.

if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.

Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free

so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."

"says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically when you're trying to do complex procedures such as an operation."

The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.

Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers

"You could imagine situations in the future where you can actually dial in a surgery from the ground

This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a

then the cable can get taut and fracture, which is really bad news . So we wanted to understand what was underlying those patterns.

which, when wound on a spool, retains a certain amount of curve as it unwound.

who are demonstrating delivery of vaccines in Africa. Delta Drone in France is using the platform for open-air mining operations,

#A new way to model cancer Sequencing the genomes of tumor cells has revealed thousands of mutations associated with cancer.

They have shown that a gene-editing system called CRISPR can introduce cancer-causing mutations into the livers of adult mice enabling scientists to screen these mutations much more quickly.

In a study appearing in the Aug 6 issue of Nature the researchers generated liver tumors in adult mice by disrupting the tumor suppressor genes p53 and pten.

They are now working on ways to deliver the necessary CRISPR components to other organs allowing them to investigate mutations found in other types of cancer.

The sequencing of human tumors has revealed hundreds of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes in different combinations.

Tyler Jacks director of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the David H. Koch Professor of Biology is the paper s senior author.

Gene disruptioncrispr relies on cellular machinery that bacteria use to defend themselves from viral infection.

To investigate the potential usefulness of CRISPR for creating mouse models of cancer the researchers first used it to knock out p53 and pten

Previous studies have shown that genetically engineered mice with mutations in both of those genes will develop cancer within a few months.

and pten the researchers were able to disrupt those two genes in about 3 percent of liver cells enough to produce liver tumors within three months.

Using CRISPR to generate tumors should allow scientists to more rapidly study how different genetic mutations interact to produce cancers as well as the effects of potential drugs on tumors with a specific genetic profile.

This is a game-changer for the production of engineered strains of human cancer says Ronald Depinho director of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center who was not part of the research team.

Enhanced potential of this powerful technology will be realized with improved delivery methods the testing of#CRISPR/Cas9 efficiency in other organs and tissues and the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in tumor-prone backgrounds.

In this study the researchers delivered the genes necessary for CRISPR through injections into veins in the tails of the mice.

The research was funded by the National institutes of health and the National Cancer Institute u

#A new way to detect leaks in pipes Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have made frequently headlines in recent years,

as well as serve as plant-based biosensors and stress reducers. By adapting the sensors to different targets,

pesticides, fungal infections, or exposure to bacterial toxins. They are also working on incorporating electronic nanomaterials, such as graphene, into plants. ight now,

the two lead authors, are former postdocs in the laboratory of Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

from environmental remediation to medical analysis. The polymers are synthesized at room temperature, and don need to be prepared specially to target specific compounds;

offering the example of a cheap testing kit for urine analysis of medical patients. The study also suggests the broader potential for adapting nanoscale drug-delivery techniques developed for use in environmental remediation. hat we can apply some of the highly sophisticated,

and an expert in nanoengineering for health care and medical applications. hen you think about field deployment,

a field that uses biology to develop new tools for science, technology and medicine. The new study, published in print today in the journal Nano Letters,

and to aid our understanding of a range of diseases, "explained Professor 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."

An atomically thin two-dimensional ultrasensitive semiconductor material for biosensing developed by researchers at UC Santa barbara promises to push the boundaries of biosensing technology in many fields from health care to environmental protection to forensic industries.

This transformative technology enables highly specific low-power high-throughput physiological sensing that can be multiplexed to detect a number of significant disease-specific factors in real time commented Scott Hammond executive director of UCSB's Translational Medicine

In essence continued Hammond the promise of true evidence-based personalized medicine is finally becoming reality. This demonstration is said quite remarkable Andras Kis professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and a leading scientist in the field of 2d materials and devices.

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