#Hand And Arm Movement To Quadriplegic Patients Restored A pioneering surgical technique has restored some hand
and arm movement to patients immobilized by spinal cord injuries in the neck, reports a new study.
however, instead of trains on a track, the surgeons redirect peripheral nerves in a quadriplegic's arms and hands by connecting healthy nerves to the injured nerves.
The researchers assessed outcomes of nerve-transfer surgery in nine quadriplegic patients with spinal cord injuries in the neck.
"Physically, nerve-transfer surgery provides incremental improvements in hand and arm function. However, psychologically, these small steps are huge for a patient's quality of life,
assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at at Washington University School of medicine in St louis."One of my patients told me he was able to pick up a noodle off his chest
'Before the surgery, he couldn't move his fingers. It meant a lot for him to clean off that noodle without anyone helping him."
Ultimately, medical professionals hope to discover a way to restore full movement to the estimated 250,000 people in the United states living with spinal cord injuries.
More than half of such injuries involve the neck. However, until a cure is found, progress in regaining basic independence in routine tasks is important.
Indeed one of the most humbling effects of spine damage is the inability to manage bladder or bowel functions."
"People with spinal cord injuries cannot control those functions because their brains can't talk to the nerves in the lower body,
and they often can't feel the need to go to the bathroom, "said Fox, who performs surgeries at Barnes-Jewish Hospital?."
"Patients often can't insert a catheter to empty their bladders or insert a suppository for bowel movement and have to rely on help from a caregiver.
But after this surgery, one of my patients was able to independently catheterize himself, which he hadn't been able to do since his accident over a decade ago.
This boost in privacy and personal space restores a significant amount of dignity.""The procedure allowed a St louis primary care physician
and a father of eight to feed himself with a fork, write with a pen,
look into patients'ears with an otoscope and drive his kids to activities. In 2012, Michael D. Bavlsik, MD, lost the ability to use his left hand
and his van collided with a boat and a trailer. None of the boys was injured severely,
"Nerve-transfer surgery has been very successful in helping me because it restored triceps function and improvement in my grip,"said Bavlsik, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the School of medicine."
"I am extremely grateful for this surgery.""Surgeons at Washington University pioneered nerve-transfer surgery.
Developed about 25 years ago by the study's senior author, Susan E. Mackinnon, MD, director of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the School of medicine,
the technique initially was performed to restore movement in the extremities of patients who had injured peripheral nerves
and lost the ability to move a foot or an arm. But in the past five years, the same technique has been used to restore limited movement to patients with spinal cord injuries.
Quadriplegics from Colorado, Michigan and Arizona, among other states have traveled to St louis for the surgery.
The operation can be performed even years after a spinal cord injury. It usually takes four hours,
and most patients go home the next morning. Since surgeons connect working nerves in the upper arms to a patient's damaged nerves in their arms and hands,
the technique targets patients with injuries at the C6 or C7 vertebra, the lowest bones in the neck.
It typically does not help patients who have lost all arm function due to higher injuries in vertebrae C1 through C5.
Bypassing the spinal cord surgeons reroute healthy nerves sitting above the injury site, usually in the shoulders or elbows, to paralyzed nerves in the hand or arm.
Once a connection is established, patients undergo extensive physical therapy to train the brain to recognize the new nerve signals,
"The gains after nerve-transfer surgery are said not instantaneous Mackinnon, director of the School of medicine's Center for Nerve Injury and Paralysis,
and the Sydney M. Shoenberg Jr. and Robert H. Shoenberg Professor of Surgery.""But once established, the surgery's benefits provide a way to let individuals with spinal cord injuries improve their daily lives."
"Another patient benefiting from the nerve-transfer technique is a 72-year-old right-handed man who had the surgery two years after he suffered a cervical spinal cord injury.
The doctors took healthy tissue from the patient's upper arm, connected it to a paralyzed nerve that controlled his ability to pinch
and then plugged it into a working nerve that restored the man's ability to flex his thumb and index finger.
This allowed him to feed himself and to hold a water bottle to maintain hydration, which,
in turn, reduced his risk of developing urinary tract infections and has bolstered his overall health h
#Rare Variant Discovered Through Deep Whole-genome Sequencing Of 1, 070 Japanese People A research group at Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (Tommo) has constructed successfully a Japanese population reference panel (1kjpn), from the genome information of 1,
070 individuals who had participated in the cohort studies*1 of the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project.
Tommo identified through this high-coverage sequencing (32.4 × on average), 21.2 million, including 12 million novel,
The 1kjpn was effective for imputing genotypes of the Japanese population genome wide. The data demonstrates the value of high-coverage sequencing for constructing population-specific variant panels,
which covers 99.0%SNVS of minor allele frequency? 0. 1, %and its value for identifying causal rare variants of complex human disease phenotypes in genetic association studies.
This research has produced a basic analysis tool for the large-scale identification and study of the genes related to the physical constitution and diseases that are peculiar to the Japanese.
It has yielded so far important results that can accelerate the research of personalized healthcare and medicine.
The results of this research were released in the online version of Nature Communications on August 21, 2015.
Background Tohoku University Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (known as Tommo) has been working in cooperation with Iwate Medical University on the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project.
It is part of the universities'contribution towards reconstruction of the region following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011.
Since 2013, the two universities have been conducting cohort studies, which include some150, 000 community residents in Miyagi and Iwate prefectures e
#Artificial Foam Heart Created Researchers have developed a new lightweight and stretchable material with the consistency of memory foam that has potential for use in prosthetic body parts, artificial organs and soft robotics.
The polymer foam starts as a liquid that can be poured into a mold to create shapes,
Cornell researchers are close to making prosthetic body parts with the so-called"elastomer foam.""""We are currently pretty far along for making a prosthetic hand this way,
"said Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and senior author of a paper in Advanced Materials.
The researchers used carbon fiber and silicone on the outside to fashion a structure that expands at different rates on the surface-to make a spherical shape into an egg shape, for example,
We are also focusing on biocompatibility, "Shepherd said d
#A New Way To Starve Lung cancer? Scientists have identified a new way to stop the growth of lung cancer cells,
which is the second most common cancer and accounts for over one-quarter of all cancer-related deaths.
A team of scientists from Mcgill University, Washington University in St louis, ITMO University in Saint petersburg, Russia,
and the University of Bristol in the UK studied the response of cancer cells to reduced availability of glucose, the main fuel source for most cancer cells.
Research Associate at Mcgill University and lead author of the study.""We found that some cancer cells also express PEPCK,
and this confers to them the ability to convert glutamine into energy and building blocks to support their growth.
By making this metabolic switch, PEPCK allows cancer cells not just to survive, but to continue to proliferate under starvation conditions."
"The scientists demonstrated that blocking PEPCK in cancer cells could slow tumor growth in mice. Alternative fuels for cancer cells The group also found evidence of increased PEPCK levels in tissues from lung-cancer patients."
"The fact that PEPCK levels are elevated in some cases of human lung cancer suggests that this enzyme may play a role in the human disease,
"adds Russell Jones, Associate professor of Physiology at Mcgill University's Goodman Cancer Research Centre. The study suggests that nutrient availability in the organism,
and other nutrients, can impact cancer progression.""Our work shows that cancers can use alternative fuel sources to help drive their growth under stressful conditions,"notes Prof.
Jones."This remarkable flexibility is part of what makes cancer so deadly, but offers hope in finding new therapies.""
""Understanding the mechanisms used by cancer cells to adapt to their environment creates new possibilities to treat this deadly disease,
"explains Alexey Sergushichev, bioinformatician and Phd student at the Department of Computer technologies at ITMO University."
"We hope our work on PEPCK and the metabolic alterations in lung cancer cells will lead to innovations in treatment for non-small cell lung cancer, one of the most deadly types of cancer
#Artificial skin That Can Send Pressure sensation To Brain cell Stanford engineers have created a plastic"skin"that can detect how hard it is being pressed
and generate an electric signal to deliver this sensory input directly to a living brain cell.
Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has spent a decade trying to develop a material that mimics skin's ability to flex and heal,
while also serving as the sensor net that sends touch, temperature and pain signals to the brain.
Ultimately she wants to create a flexible electronic fabric embedded with sensors that could cover a prosthetic limb
and replicate some of skin's sensory functions. Bao's work reported today in Science,
takes another step toward her goal by replicating one aspect of touch, the sensory mechanism that enables us to distinguish the pressure difference between a limp handshake and a firm grip."
who led the 17-person research team responsible for the achievement. Benjamin Tee, a recent doctoral graduate in electrical engineering;
Alex Chortos, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering; and Andre Berndt, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering, were the lead authors on the Science paper.
The heart of the technique is a two-ply plastic construct: the top layer creates a sensing mechanism
and the bottom layer acts as the circuit to transport electrical signals and translate them into biochemical stimuli compatible with nerve cells.
The top layer in the new work featured a sensor that can detect pressure over the same range as human skin,
from a light finger tap to a firm handshake. Five years ago, Bao's team members first described how to use plastics
and rubbers as pressure sensors by measuring the natural springiness of their molecular structures. They then increased this natural pressure sensitivity by indenting a waffle pattern into the thin plastic
which further compresses the plastic's molecular springs. To exploit this pressure-sensing capability electronically,
the team scattered billions of carbon nanotubes through the waffled plastic. Putting pressure on the plastic squeezes the nanotubes closer together
and enables them to conduct electricity. This allowed the plastic sensor to mimic human skin,
which transmits pressure information as short pulses of electricity, similar to Morse code, to the brain.
Increasing pressure on the waffled nanotubes squeezes them even closer together, allowing more electricity to flow through the sensor,
and those varied impulses are sent as short pulses to the sensing mechanism. Remove pressure and the flow of pulses relaxes, indicating light touch.
Remove all pressure and the pulses cease entirely. The team then hooked this pressure-sensing mechanism to the second ply of their artificial skin,
a flexible electronic circuit that could carry pulses of electricity to nerve cells. Bao's team has been developing flexible electronics that can bend without breaking.
For this project, team members worked with researchers from PARC, a Xerox company, which has a technology that uses an inkjet printer to deposit flexible circuits onto plastic.
Covering a large surface is important to making artificial skin practical and the PARC collaboration offered that prospect.
Finally the team had to prove that the electronic signal could be recognized by a biological neuron.
It did this by adapting a technique developed by Karl Deisseroth, a fellow professor of bioengineering at Stanford who pioneered a field that combines genetics and optics, called optogenetics.
Researchers bioengineer cells to make them sensitive to specific frequencies of light, then use light pulses to switch cells,
or the processes being carried on inside them, on and off. For this experiment the team members engineered a line of neurons to simulate a portion of the human nervous system.
They translated the electronic pressure signals from the artificial skin into light pulses which activated the neurons,
proving that the artificial skin could generate a sensory output compatible with nerve cells. Optogenetics was used only as an experimental proof of concept,
Bao said, and other methods of stimulating nerves are likely to be used in real prosthetic devices.
Bao's team has worked already with Bianxiao Cui, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford, to show that direct stimulation of neurons with electrical pulses is possible.
Bao's team envisions developing different sensors to replicate, for instance, the ability to distinguish corduroy versus silk,
There are six types of biological sensing mechanisms in the human hand and the experiment described in Science reports success in just one of them.
And the inkjet printing fabrication process suggests how a network of sensors could be deposited over a flexible layer and folded over a prosthetic hand."
"We have a lot of work to take this from experimental to practical applications, "Bao said.""But after spending many years in this work,
I now see a clear path where we can take our artificial skin
#New Test To Predict Relapse Of Testicular cancers Scientists have developed a new test to identify patients who are at risk of suffering a relapse from testicular cancer.
Assessing just three features of a common kind of testicular cancer-called non-seminomatous germ cell tumor-can identify those at most at risk of relapse even where there is no evidence of tumor spread.
The researchers believe the test could be used in the clinic to make decisions about which patients should be given chemotherapy.
Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, analyzed 177 tumor samples from patients with stage I non-seminomatous tumors enrolled in clinical trials through the Medical Research Council (MRC
Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR found that three different features of the tumors were important indicators of relapse risk:
the levels of a molecule called CXCL12, the percentage of the tumor with an appearance of cancer stem cells and whether or not blood vessels were present in the tumor.
They scored tumors based on these features, and found that combining scores could divide patients up into three different risk groups based on how likely patients were to suffer a relapse of the disease within two years.
It is rare for a patient to relapse from testicular cancer beyond this time. They found that the vast majority of patients were in the low-risk group-where 94.3 percent of patients were relapse free for two years.
Testicular germ cell tumors are the most common solid malignant tumor in young Caucasian men. Patients diagnosed with early-stage disease face a choice between monitoring with treatment
if relapse does occur or upfront chemotherapy with its associated long-term side-effects. Predicting who does
therefore important to minimize treatment in this largely curable disease. Study leader Professor Janet Shipley Professor of Cancer Molecular Pathology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said,
"Our research has led to the development of a test that can detect patients that will benefit from treatment up front
and spare those who are at lower risk from the side-effects of chemotherapy.""Chemotherapy is extremely effective in treating testicular cancer,
Approaches such as this to minimize chemotherapy are particularly important for cancers like testicular cancer, which affect young adults who could live with the side-effects for decades."
"Professor Robert Huddart, Professor of Urological Cancer at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Consultant at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said,
"Patients with stage 1 non-seminomatous germ cell tumors have to make a difficult choice of
whether to be watched or to receive chemotherapy to reduce the risk of relapse. Our study may help men make this decision as among the three groups of patients identified we have found one with a very low risk of relapse where surveillance would seem to be best choice
We now need to test this prognostic index in larger groups of men in the clinic"The work was funded by the MRC with support from the National Cancer Research Institute Testis Cancer Clinical Studies Group,
and is published in Clinical Cancer Research h
#Artificial'skin'Provides Prosthetics With Sensation Using flexible organic circuits and specialized pressure sensors, researchers have created an artificial skin"that can sense the force of static objects.
Furthermore, they were able to transfer these sensory signals to the brain cells of mice in vitro using optogenetics.
For the many people around the world living with prosthetics, such a system could one day allow them to feel sensation in their artificial limbs.
A particular challenge was creating sensors that can"feel"the same range of pressure that humans can.
Thus, on the sensors, the team used carbon nanotubes molded into pyramidal microstructures, which are particularly effective at tunneling the signals from the electric field of nearby objects to the receiving electrode in a way that maximizes sensitivity.
Transferring the digital signal from the artificial skin system to the cortical neurons of mice proved to be another challenge,
since conventional light-sensitive proteins used in optogenetics do not stimulate neural spikes for sufficient durations for these digital signals to be sensed.
Tee et al. therefore engineered new optogenetic proteins able to accommodate longer intervals of stimulation. Applying these newly engineered optogenic proteins to fast-spiking interneurons of the somatosensory cortex of mice in vitro sufficiently prolonged the stimulation interval
#Protein Found In Malaria Could Help Stop Cancer Researchers have discovered how a protein from malaria could some day help stop cancer.
While exploring why pregnant women are particularly susceptible to malaria, they found that the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria also produces a protein that binds to a particular type of sugar molecule in the placenta.
Researchers found that the same type of sugar molecule also is present in many types of cancer.
They realized that the sugar molecule--oncofetal chondroitin sulfate--could be a target for anticancer drugs,
called VAR2CSA, could provide the tool for carrying such drugs to tumors. It's somehow fitting that a disease as destructive as malaria might be exploited to treat another dreaded disease like cancer."
"Based on our clinical data, we helped validate that this could be applied to melanoma and lung cancers,"said Dr. Nhan Tran, an Associate professor in Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGEN)' s Cancer and Cell biology Division,
and one of the authors of the study.""This specific type of developmental protein--oncofetal chondroitin sulfate--is expressed in the placenta,
and is expressed also in lung cancer and in melanoma.""Malaria uses VAR2CSA to embed itself in the placenta--hiding itself from the immune system--by binding to oncofetal chondroitin sulfate.
In laboratory experiments, researchers found that if they used the malarial protein, VAR2CSA, and attached an anticancer drug to it,
it would bind with the oncofetal protein in the cancer, delivering the drug to the tumor."
"Scientists have spent decades trying to find biochemical similarities between placenta tissue and cancer, but we just didn't have the technology to find it,
"said project leader Mads Daugaard, an assistant professor of urologic science at UBC and a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, part of the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute."
"When my colleagues discovered how malaria uses VAR2CSA to embed itself in the placenta, we immediately saw its potential to deliver cancer drugs in a precise, controlled way to tumors.""
""This is an extraordinary finding that paves the way for targeting sugar molecules in pediatric and adulthood human cancer,
and our groups are vigorously pursuing this possibility together, "said Poul Sorensen, a UBC professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and distinguished scientist with the BC Cancer Agency and co-senior investigator on the study y
#Epilepsy Switch Discovered Approximately five percent of people suffers an epileptic attack, during which the nerve cells get out of their usual rhythm and fire in a very rapid frequency, over the course of their lives.
This results in seizures and such synchronous discharges in the brain occur most frequently in the temporal lobe.
Often, a seizure disorder develops after a delay following transient brain damage-for example due to injury or inflammation.
So-called ion channels are involved in the transfer of signals in the brain; these channels act like a doorman to regulate the entry of calcium ions in the nerve cells.
Scientists at the University of Bonn and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) have decoded a central signal cascade associated with epileptic seizures.
If the researchers blocked a central switch in epileptic mice, the frequency and severity of the seizures decreased.
Using a novel technology, it was possible to observe the processes prior to the occurrence of epileptic seizures in living animals."
"It has also been known for a long time that following transient severe brain injury and prior to an initial spontaneous epileptic seizure, the concentration of free zinc ions increases in the hippocampus.
But science has been puzzled about the significance of this phenomenon, "says Prof. Dr. Albert J. Becker from the Institute of Neuropathology of the University of Bonn.
The hippocampus, located in the temporal lobe, is a central switching station in the brain. MTF1 acts like a switch in the brain The team of Prof.
Becker, together with scientists from the departments of Experimental Epileptology and Neuroradiology of the University of Bonn Hospital as well as from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Israel
If the number of zinc ions increases following transient severe brain damage, these ions dock in greater numbers onto a switch, the so-called metal-regulatory transcription factor 1 (MTF1.
This leads to a large increase in the amount of a special calcium ion channel in the nerve cells and overall, this significantly boosts the risk of epileptic seizures.
The scientists demonstrated the fact that the transcription factor MTF1 plays a central role in this connection using an experiment on mice suffering from epilepsy."
we inhibited MTF1 in the epileptic mice and as a result, the seizures in the animals were much rarer
This makes it possible to examine the processes which take place during the development of epilepsy in a living animal."
"If the fluorescence molecules glow, this indicates that the mouse is developing chronic epileptic seizures, "says the molecular biologist Prof.
Dr. Susanne Schoch from the department of Neuropathology at the University of Bonn. The researchers also see a possible potential in this new technology for novel diagnostic approaches in humans s
#Sonic Tractor Beam Invented A team of researchers have built the world's first sonic tractor beam that can lift
and move objects using sound waves. Tractor beams can grab and lift objects, a concept that has been used by science-fiction writers
and has fascinated since scientists and engineers. Researchers have built now a working tractor beam that uses high-amplitude sound waves to generate an acoustic hologram
which can pick up and move small objects. The researchers used an array of 64 miniature loudspeakers to create high-pitch and high-intensity sound waves.
The tractor beam works by surrounding the object with high-intensity sound and this creates a force field that keeps the objects in place.
The team have shown that three different shapes of acoustic force fields work as tractor beams. The first is an acoustic force field that resembles a pair of fingers or tweezers.
and then trapped at the core and the third is described best as a high-intensity cage that surrounds the objects and holds them in place from all directions s
#New solar battery outperforms conventional lithium-iodine batteries By combining a solar cell and a battery into a single device,
researchers in the US have made the first truly viable solar batteries. Not only can this battery compete with regular lithium-iodine batteries,
it can actually outperform them, producing the same output with less charging, achieving an energy saving of 20 percent.
That 20 percent comes directly from sunlight, which is harvested by a flat solar panel on top of the battery.
Below, the researchers have installed a new type of electrolyte that replaces the lithium-cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate of regular battery electrolytes with water."
"The truly important innovation here is that we've successfully demonstrated aqueous flow inside our solar battery,"one of the team,
Yiying Wu from Ohio State university, said in a press release.""It's also totally compatible with current battery technology,
very easy to integrate with existing technology, environmentally friendly and easy to maintain.""The team is the same one that debuted the world first solar air battery last year,
and theye now improved on the design, by making the solar panel a solid sheet rather than a mesh,
because it no longer needs air flow to function, and by adding the water-based electrolyte.
Called an aqueous solar flow battery, this world-first design could be the basis of an entirely new class of batteries,
with or without the solar component installed.""In the original version, the researchers used a more conventional liquid electrolyte consisting of part salt
and part solvent (perchlorate mixed with organic solvent dimethyl sulphoxide, to be precise),"Nick Lavars reports for Gizmag."
"This has been replaced with water as the solvent and lithium iodide as the salt, which offers low-cost, high-energy storage capabilities."
"The solar cell is also super-efficient, known as a dye-sensitised solar cell. The team used a red dye called ruthenium to tune the wavelength of light it captures
According to the press release, these electrons are used then to supplement the voltage stored in the lithium-anode portion of the solar battery.
When they tested their solar batteries against conventional lithium-iodine batteries, they charged and discharged them 25 times to see how much electricity they would discharge each round.
Each time, both batteries discharged around 3. 3 volts. But as Lavars reports at Gizmag while the typical battery needed to be charged to 3. 6 volts to discharge 3. 3 volts,
the solar battery only needed to be charged to 2. 9 volts, while the solar panel made up the other 20 percent.
The team now wants to work on increasing this percentage, and are working towards 100 percent energy savings,
which would make it a fully solar-chargeable battery. But as they are, these solar batteries are already looking pretty damn practical."
"This solar flow battery design can potentially be applied for grid-scale solar energy conversion and storage, as well as producing'electrolyte fuels'that might be used to power future electric vehicles,"one of the team,
doctoral student Mingzhe Yu, said in the press release. The design is now patent pending, and the team reports the results of their testing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society S
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