but what about that time you had measles or was it chicken pox? Your blood knows:
It could also be used to identify links between viral infections and mysterious diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome.
our immune cells respond by producing antibodies that neutralise it when they bind to specific proteins on its surface.
These antibodies continue to be made long after the virus has been cleared from our body ready to mount a quicker response should it return.
If antibodies target it then the virus has infected the person in the past. var ord=window. ord Math. floor (Math. random()*10e12;
and could help doctors identify hidden infections.""A lot of people have hepatitis C, for example, without realising,"says Elledge.
You could imagine routinely screening people in this way, he says. To develop Virscan, Elledge and his colleagues used an international database to look up all viruses known to infect humans around 1000 strains from 206 viral species. Using this information,
any circulating antibodies latch on to the associated proteins on the bacteriophages. Sequencing these bacteriophages then reveals the person's viral history.
doctors have a pretty good idea of what you've got, "he says. Moreover, the immune system takes a
while to make antibodies, so you might not find a strong antibody response in the early stages of an infection.
The test would also not be able to distinguish between antibodies made as a result of an infection and those triggered by a vaccine.
Instead the technique might be useful in outbreaks of new viruses. Understanding how our immune system responds to other viral fragments might reveal clues as to
which family the new virus belongs to, says Pamela Vallely at the University of Manchester, UK."
For example, Elledge's team will be collaborating with another group to test people with chronic fatigue syndrome,
to see if they might have been infected with any of the same viruses."Multiple sclerosis is wheeled usually out as being linked to a virus,
He envisages screening wild populations of animals thought to be linked to emerging diseases.""You could test the wild bat population to get a good idea of
Wiring friendly bacteria to take out disease Matthew Wook Chang has opened an academy for assassins. His trainees are deadly.
It can wreak havoc in hospital wards, in the lungs of those with cystic fibrosis, and in the guts of premature babies.
In 2013, Chang put his assassins through their paces in a lab flask. They have since been hanging out in the guts of mice
and shell enter a wound. They can also self-amputate if they get too hot,
#Laser'tricorder'can diagnose malaria through the skin It's a weapon that fights malaria a laser scan can give an accurate diagnosis in seconds,
detecting malaria infections in only 20 seconds.""It's the first true noninvasive diagnostic, "says Dmitri Lapotko of Rice university in Houston, Texas,
whose team used the probe to correctly identify which person had malaria in a test of six individuals.
Malaria threatens half the world's population, killing 584,000 people in 2013. Existing tests for malaria are already quick,
taking only 15 to 20 minutes to give a diagnosis, but they could be simpler.
Blood has to be taken, the test has to be conducted by trained personnel to get reliable results,
"The possibility of diagnosing a malaria infection with the device, without any blood-taking and with results available in seconds will provide a fantastic new tool for the control
and eventual elimination of malaria,"says Umberto D'Alessandro of the UK Medical Research Council Unit in Gambia."
and its capability of identifying infections with low densities of parasites in the blood,"says D'Alessandro,
if a patient has a dark skin a potentially huge pitfall given that children living in Africa account for the majority of malaria deaths.
#Finally, a way to catch symptomless pancreatic cancer in time It's the sneakiest of cancers and as many as 80 per cent of cases are identified too late.
The disease has one of the worst cancer survival rates, with less than 4 per cent of people living for five years or more after diagnosis. A major cause of this is that
by the time symptoms start appearing, pancreatic cancer is advanced often too to treat successfully. The disease is identified only in time for curative surgery in about 15 per cent of people
so early diagnosis is crucial for improving survival rates. Now, researchers have identified a protein that is present in the blood at much higher levels
when a person has the disease, giving us a way to test for it. The protein, glypican-1, sticks out from the surface of exosomes little globules that are thought to bud off from pancreatic cancer cells.
Other cells in the body also produce these exosomes, but they seem to carry much less of this protein.
Raghu Kalluri of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston found that there is so much more glypican-1 in people with pancreatic cancer that a blood test can be used to accurately distinguish them from both healthy controls and people with the disease pancreatitis."
"The margin is always large enough to detect cancer exosomes, "says Kalluri. When to test?"
"says Nell Barrie of the charity Cancer Research UK.""This could, in turn, one day offer a way to spot diseases like pancreatic cancer at a much earlier stage,
although there is much more work to be done to develop this into an actual test, "she says.
and have a family history of the disease. The test could also be used for tracking the progress of therapies
and recovery, says Kalluri. His team found that the concentration of glypican-1 increases with the disease's severity,
potentially providing doctors with a measure for how advanced the cancer is and a way to monitor the effectiveness of treatments.
Former Apple CEO Steve jobs and actor Patrick Swayze both had pancreatic cancer, which is so deadly partly because of its limited treatment options, with few new and effective drugs and therapies available l
#What is artificial blood and why is the UK going to trial it? Artificial blood will soon be tested in the UK for the first time.
In other words, the goal is to find an alternative to oxygen-carrying red blood cells that could be used for transfusions.
Today, the UK National Health service announced it plans to start transfusing people with artificial blood by 2017 the first clinical trials of this kind anywhere in the world.
Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Ocata Therapeutics formerly Advanced Cell Technology-in Marlborough, Massachusetts,
and his colleagues performed the first small transfusion of such lab-grown red blood cells into human volunteers.
with about 50 per cent still circulating in the blood 26 days after the transfusion.
Douay said in 2011 that it will be a big challenge to scale up the technology to generate enough artificial cells for regular transfusion.
Even then, they produced about a twentieth of the number of cells that would be needed for a single transfusion.
may be useful for testing new drugs or monitoring diseases. We've levitated living things using magnets before,
Understanding the varied responses of cells could be a great boon to testing out new drugs and diagnosing diseases,
useful for picking out rare cells needed in a diagnosis. Grover's reservations are echoed by George Whitesides of Harvard university,
Shining red light on skin or cells in a dish gives an instant energy boost that could help heal wounds,
relieve pain and perhaps help male infertility and other medical conditions. The curious healing effect has been known for decades researchers have been investigating its use in eye injuries
since 2002 but why it works has been a mystery. It turns out the explanation could be simple and yet strange:
"Other research groups are investigating this phenomenon as a way to speed up the healing of skin wounds
whether red light shone into mice's heads using fibre optics can help with Parkinson's disease. A better understanding of how red light affects cells should make it easier to expand its medical uses,
says Sommer.""If we start from an incorrect model then everything is trial and error.""One of the next applications could be in helping couples undergoing IVF because of problems with male fertility.
says IVF doctor Friedrich Gagsteiger of the Fertility Centre in Ulm. Gagsteiger has investigated previously other ways of giving sperm more oomph,
but also seems to be toxic. Gagsteiger is now starting tests of irradiating sperm with the near-infrared light before fertilisation."
#Smart mirror monitors your face for telltale signs of disease Mirror mirror on the wall, am I at risk of heart disease?
Facial recognition software looks for telltale markers of stress or anxiety, while the gas sensors take samples of the user breath looking for compounds that give an indication of how much they drink or smoke.
like heart disease or diabetes. Need for prevention revention is the most viable approach to reduce the socioeconomic burden of chronic and widespread diseases,
such as cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, they write. Clinical trials of the device will begin next year at three sites in France
and Italy, aiming to compare its readings with those from traditional medical devices. Consumer technology that can read signals from the body to interpret underlying physical
and mental health is on the cusp of becoming part of everyday life. For example, Cardiio, originally developed at the Massachusetts institute of technology
is an app that uses a smartphone camera to monitor blood levels in the face
which could boost our ability to track the spread of diseases such as cancer. Humar and his colleagues developed three ways to get cells to emit visible light.
it can officially take Nigeria off the list of countries where the disease is endemic.
The vaccination drive has been dogged by political corruption rumours the vaccine was contaminated with HIV and violence nine health workers were killed by terrorist group Boko Haram in 2013.
Nigeria has come close to eradicating the disease several times before, only for it to re-emerge. But this is the longest the country has gone without reporting a case,
says Rosenbaum. The road to zero cases The only places where the disease still circulates regularly are Afghanistan and Pakistan,
which have reported 5 and 28 cases of polio respectively this year. For each of these, there will be around 199 other people who are infected but symptomless
but not enough so that the disease would be considered endemic there. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan are making progress with their vaccination campaigns,
but too many children are missed, partly due to the difficulties in reaching people in rural areas with poor infrastructure,
A lack of international funding for the vaccination campaigns is also a problem, says Rosenbaum.
and unless we get to zero cases wee not going to finish this disease, says Rosenbaum. igeria will need to keep immunising and protecting the population. i
"I'm interested in solving a worldwide problem of diarrheal diseases, "says Dr. Mark Donowitz,
who runs this lab. He says 800,000 children a year die from these diseases notably cholera, rotavirus and certain strains of E coli."
"We've failed so far to find drugs to treat diarrhea using cell culture models
so they aren't very helpful for studying diseases of the gut. So Donowitz's team is building
what it hopes will be a much better way to study these diseases: the gut-on-a-chip.
whether cells in the ersatz organ react the same way to diseases as do cells in the human gut."
"And in all three of the diseases I mentioned, we've been able to take that first step,
"So we know that these appear to be really good models of the human disease."
one use will be to test potential drugs for the diseases being studied.""We think this could be a real step forward in terms of reducing waste-of-time drug development,
nor is there evidence at this time that medical information such as claims, test results, or diagnostic codes were targeted
One in nine Americans receives coverage for his medical care through Anthem's affiliated plans, according to a statement on its website e
to cut out inherited DNA that can cause serious health problems in children. The House of commons voted to approve the Human Fertilization
The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation estimates that from 1000 to 4000 American children are born each year with a mitochondrial disease e
#Leaky Blood vessels In The Brain May Lead To Alzheimer's Researchers appear to have found a new risk factor for Alzheimer's disease:
But the process is accelerated in those likely to develop Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia.
or prevent Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.""This study gives patients and families hope for the future,
hope that detecting leaky blood vessels early will provide the opportunity to stop dementia before it starts,
The new research grew out of earlier studies of people who died with Alzheimer's disease.""We were looking at brains from autopsies
"There's every reason to think that a lot of Alzheimer's disease does involve vascular damage, "he says. The study also adds to the evidence that amyloid plaques
There are probably several different paths to dementia, Corriveau says, including one that involves leaky blood vessels.
Viruses there contaminated a plant where bacteria were used to make drugs for two rare genetic disorders, Gaucher disease and Fabry disease, cutting off supplies.
#Ebola Vaccine Hailed As'Game Changer'In Fight Against The Virus Doctors Without Borders is calling it a"champagne moment."
"In a small trial, an experimental vaccine protected 100 percent of participants who were at high risk for the virus
and preventing the next epidemic.""It is a game changer because there was nothing that could protect people against Ebola no drug,
vaccine or medicine,"says Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general for health systems and innovation at the World health organization,
"The vaccine, called rvsv-ZEBOV, was developed by the Public health Agency of Canada. Previous studies showed it was safe.
In April, WHO and Doctors Without Borders started testing its effectiveness in Guinea. The trial is ongoing,
The vaccine stops Ebola in its tracks, Kieny says.""When we talked with our colleagues who are responding to Ebola cases,
And we vaccinate, and the cases seem to disappear.'"'"In fact, there are so few cases in Guinea right
now that Kieny and her team couldn't use the standard method for testing a vaccine.
The strategy uses what's called ring vaccination. When a case crops up, the team rushes to scene andgives the vaccine to people who are close to the sick person those who are at high risk of getting the virus."So this can be the neighbors, the family, the coworkers,
"Kieny says.""This forms what is called a ring. These are the people that form the community around the case."
000 people in these so-called rings who were eligible for vaccination. They divided them up into two groups.
About half got vaccinated immediately, and the others had to wait three weeks for the shot.
In the group that got the vaccine immediately, no one got Ebola.""No cases at all. Zero,"Kieny says."
The problem is there were only 16 cases of Ebola in the group that didn't get the vaccine immediately.
That's way too small of a number to say how well the vaccine works,
But statistical analyses suggest the vaccine's efficacy is at least 70 percent, Kieny says which is still good enough to stop the spread of the disease."
"I think it is very encouraging to see these very positive, preliminary results of this vaccine trial from Guinea,"says Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, who once led vaccine development at the U s. Food and Drug Administration.
Goodman says we need to be cautious about the study. More data are needed to nail down the vaccine's efficacy.
And there were a few issues with the design of the experiment that could have skewed the results."
"the strength of the difference between the groups that were vaccinated early and late suggests strongly to me that this vaccine is working. i
#The Future Of Cardiology Will be shown In 3-D How can you tell the difference between a good surgeon and an exceptional one?
You could start by looking for the one who has the rare ability to visualize a human organ in three dimensions from little more than a scan."
"The handful of the top surgeons in the world are said like sculptors Dr. Deepak Srivastava, a director at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco."
"When cardiovascular surgeons go in to repair a defect in the heart, their success is so often dependent on an ability to see the anatomy in 3-D in their minds,
"said Srivastava.""That's more difficult for younger, less experienced surgeons.""But recent advancements in the field of computer-based modeling may make it easier someday for good surgeons to be great.
One such technology comes from Dassault systèmes, a French company that specializes in 3-D software to help engineers who design cars
and planes avoid potentially fatal outcomes. Earlier this week, Dassault released its highly realistic digital model of the human heart,
"Doctors wear 3-D glasses and use a joystick to zoom in to a ventricle or valve,
and test all the possibilities before a heart surgery,"said Dr. Steve Levine, chief strategy officer and director for the Living Heart Project.
The technology hasn't received regulatory approval for doctors to use it in making medical decisions.
But hospitals can buy it for research and educational purposes, such as exploring triggers that cause heart attacks.
Dassault hopes that medical device makers will also use the Living Heart Project's technology for research and development.
The software is free to organizations that agree to conduct research and share their findings with the project.
Recruiting Partners in Health care For the Living Heart Project, Levine has recruited so far 45 partners,
including the Mayo Clinic, Stanford university and the University of Oxford. Levine said the Food and Drug Administration initially wanted to take a"watch
"Challenges to greater adoption of computer-modeling include a lack of data for some medical conditions,
At the University of California, San francisco, a team of researchers in the cardiology division are hoping to use the Living Heart Project to figure out the best time to replace patients'heart valves.
Surgeons have to strike the right balance between swapping out too early, when a valve is still working reasonably well,
But he isn't convinced it will transform how are surgeries are performed.""Is this a hammer looking for a nail?"
"Or will this change how we practice medicine?""He said he hopes advanced technology can fill some gaps,
where surgeons are still making educated guesses, such as the timing of valve replacements. But he also said he hasn't seen a convincing study yet that proves the simulation can improve patient outcomes.
Olgin said he fears that doctors could come to rely too heavily on this technology and medical device makers could pull the plug on promising research
if the simulation shows a negative result.""The technology doesn't offer the same level of evidence as medical research on animals or small pilot human trials,
the sources of the fundamental rift between listeners and labels the digital infection. Once you could strip a song from its physical home
turned this germ into a pandemic. The industry could argue all it wanted that listeners didn't have the right to make copies
and is said to be suitable for a wide range of endoscopic devices from bronchoscopes for lung examinations to laparoscopes used in keyhole surgery applications."
"This camera module has been designed specifically for medical applications with stringent biocompatibility, sterilization and electrical requirements,"said Shingo Ishii, group leader of the medical business development division at Fujikura.
He adds that the module very small footprint and power efficiency are critical features for such applications,
and reusable endoscopes for minimally invasive medical procedures the standard wherever possible. Micro precision Based in Gardner, Massachusetts,
these devices can provide a field of view as wide as 120 degrees, a critical factor for endoscopy applications.
and optical micro-assemblies designed specifically for small CMOS-based medical camera systems. The company also showed off the innovation at last week Medical Design and Manufacturing (MD&M) event
but the firm has been touting the medical sector as one that is ripe for growth. Tehzeeb Gunja, one of its senior marketing and business development managers, said of the Fujikura/POC collaboration:"
doctors are turning to smaller, reusable endoscopes to deliver the images and video required during a medical procedure."
"Currently, there are no other image sensors available that offer the level of high performance and image quality in such a compact and power-efficient form factor."
-and using less light than some existing infrared-based alignment procedures-the principles behind eyeselfie could also now be extended outside ophthalmology and into other sectors.
Traditional systems, including applications found outside ophthalmology in head-mounted displays, have tried to enlarge the eye box
Within ophthalmology, self-imaging would allow patients to take retina photos in their own home,
allowing clinicians to better observe changes after treatment or perhaps enabling new ways to monitor diabetes."
and deploy the next generation of screening, diagnostic and therapeutic tools for eye care. One of these solutions will be eyemitra,
a mobile retinal imaging system intended to bring routine diagnostic retinal examinations-in particular for diabetic retinopathy-to developing countries where standards of eye care are low,
We anticipate that our terahertz device will have applications in personal security, scanning and various medical sectors.
#Highly-Effective Ebola Vaccine Could Stymie Future Outbreaks Over 27,000 cases and 11561 deaths. The statistics that tell the story of the most recent Ebola outbreak are stark,
but a new number published today in the medical journal The Lancet may be even more significant.
That the conclusion of a study on an Ebola vaccine developed in a 10-month sprint by the Public health Agency of Canada
000 individuals in Guinea, are welcome news. Kimberley Steeds, an Ebola vaccine trial team member, in the Ebola vaccine laboratory, Donka Hospital in Conakry,
The vaccine is consists of a modified version of a different virus called VSV, which infects cows
The trials employed the same strategy used to contain smallpox called ing vaccination. When a person comes down with the disease,
health workers identify and vaccinate anyone likely to come in contact with the patient, creating a ring of protection that hopefully keeps the virus contained
and prevents it from spreading. The new study evaluated the vaccine effectiveness by dividing recipients into two randomly assigned groups.
Half of the study participants received the vaccine as soon as one person they had been in contact withhether it was a relative, patient,
or someone elsead been diagnosed with Ebola. The other half received the vaccine after a delay of three weeks.
In the 2, 000 subjects receiving the immediate vaccination treatment, not one person contracted Ebola.
Based on these results, the immediate vaccination regimen was offered to all participants starting on July 26. Even with the vaccine apparent efficacy, the trial will continue so researchers can gather more information to license the vaccine for widespread use.
The study was orchestrated by a partnership including THE WHO, the Ministry of Health of Guinea Doctors Without Borders,
and many others, comprising a monumental scientific and logistical effort. Here James Gallagher, reporting for the BBC:
The sheer scale of the 2014-15 outbreak led to an unprecedented push on vaccines and a decade work has been condensed into around 10 months.
The numbers of Ebola outbreak cannot be erased, but the vaccine trials offer, for the first time, hope that such grim statistics will never be seen again n
#Amputees Can Now Control Their Bionic Prosthetic Limbs Using IMES Ossur, an Icelandic orthopaedics company, has developed tiny implanted myoelectric sensors (IMES) that helped amputees to control their bionic prosthetic limbs with the commands sent from their brain.
Ossur's Orthopedic surgeon and director of research and development, Thorvaldur implanted the tiny sensors into the residual muscle tissue of two amputees that they said is responsible for triggering the movement in the prosthesis via a receiver.
Olafsson, who is presently on trail with the new implants said the implants allowed him to control his bionic leg and foot almost instantly.
which develops medical technology for use in patients s
#Researchers develop new Algorithm to empower Robots to Learn like Humans New algorithms enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error, like humans.
Also, it provides the capacity to work outside controlled environments like medical centers factories or laboratories.
#Nivolumab helps fight Cancerous Lung Tumors A trial has suggested that a therapy for lung cancer has the ability to double the life expectancy in patients.
which were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Lung cancer, which is also known as carcinoma of the lung,
is the deadliest form of cancer that kills about 1. 6 million people every year. It is difficult to treat the cancer as it is usually diagnosed late.
In addition a number of patients are found unsuitable for surgery due to their smoking-related diseases.
Nivolumab is among the set of drugs known as heckpoint inhibitorsthat are developed by a number of pharmaceutical companies.
Those drugs stop cancers by turning off the immune system of human so that it could keep on attacking the harmful tumor.
The new trial was conducted in the United states and Europe on people with advanced lung cancer. Those people had tried already other treatments,
but didn receive satisfactory results. As per the trial results, patients on standard therapy lived for about 9. 4 months
but the patient who took Nivolumab lived for more than one year on average. However, some patients did spectacularly well.
Those whose tumors were producing high levels of PD-L1 lived for more than one and half year.
Luis Paz-Ares, doctor at the Hospital Universitario Doce de Octubre in Madrid and lead researcher of the trial, said,
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