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.
#A plague of fleas: Tiny Eurasian exotic is upending watery ecosystems across the northern Great lakes The zooplankton never saw it coming.
Unfortunately that doesn't stop the odd Typhoid Mary. In some places along Highway 41 in Upper Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula every lake we tested with a boat ramp had Bythotrephes.
#Painting robot lends surgeons a hand in the operating room Would you let an artist perform lifesaving surgery on you?
and shapes a surgeon makes with a scalpel using a paintbrush and canvas. His invention a creative blend of art and science could one day lend doctors a hand in practicing complex robot-assisted surgeries without having to step foot in an operating room.
Rethinking roboticslee a sophomore who plans to major in chemistry spent his high school years building everything from a robot that can balance on a beam to a robotic arm that can throw a ball.
and that prompted the idea of robotic surgery. Lee said painting and surgery have more in common than initially meets the eye.
A painter has to be nimble and precise with his brushstrokes much like a surgeon must be nimble and precise with a scalpel.
When you are dissecting a part of the human body you have to be one hundred percent perfect he said.
With the support of a grant from the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA) Center Lee teamed up with Craig Hamilton an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest Baptist Medical center
and shapes a surgeon makes with a scalpel all on its own he said. You can think of a painting canvas as a body and the brush as a surgeon's knife.
Practicing in a surgeon's studiocurrently surgical robots are controlled by a human operator and do not perform procedures autonomously.
While Lee's robot may never be put to work in an operating room it and other robots like it could one day help researchers to design fully autonomous robotic surgeons.
In addition to teaching the robot to paint autonomously Lee also explored the idea of using his robot as a training tool for surgeons who need practice operating a Da vinci surgical arm.
At the Wake Forest Medical center doctors use replica bodies to help train surgeons to use the Da vinci system Lee said.
These replicas are compared pretty expensive to my robotic arm which cost around $1500. This April Lee will represent Wake Forest at the ACC Meeting of the Minds an event where outstanding undergraduate researchers from each ACC university gather at one member university to present their research either verbally or as a poster.
#Cell-Squeezing Device Opens New Possibilities for Cell-Based Vaccines A newly published study details how researchers from MIT developed a new microfluidic cell-squeezing device, opening new possibilities for cell
-based vaccines. MIT researchers have shown that they can use a microfluidic cell-squeezing device to introduce specific antigens inside the immune system B cells,
providing a new approach to developing and implementing antigen-presenting cell vaccines. Such vaccines, created by reprogramming a patient own immune cells to fight invaders,
hold great promise for treating cancer and other diseases. However, several inefficiencies have limited their translation to the clinic
and only one therapy has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. While most of these vaccines are created with dendritic cells,
a class of antigen-presenting cells with broad functionality in the immune system, the researchers demonstrate in a study published in Scientific Reports that B cells can be engineered to serve as an alternative. e wanted to remove an important barrier in using B cells as an antigen-presenting cell population,
helping them complement or replace dendritic cells, says Gregory Szeto, a postdoc at MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the paper lead author.
Darrell Irvine a member of the Koch Institute and a professor of biological engineering and of materials sciences and engineering, is the paper senior author.
A new vaccine-preparation approachdendritic cells are the most naturally versatile antigen-presenting cells. In the body, they continuously sample antigens from potential invaders,
which they process and present on their cell surface. The cells then migrate to the spleen or the lymph nodes,
where they prime T cells to mount an attack against cells that are infected cancerous or, targeting the specific antigens that are ingested and presented.
Despite their critical role in the immune system dendritic cells have used drawbacks when for cell-based vaccines:
They have a short lifespan, they do not divide when activated, and they are relatively sparse in the bloodstream.
B cells are also antigen-presenting cells, but in contrast to dendritic cells, they can proliferate
when activated and are abundant in the bloodstream. However, their functionality is limited more: Whereas dendritic cells constantly sample antigens they encounter,
A b cell is programmed genetically only to bind to a specific antigen that matches the receptor on its surface.
As such, A b cell generally will not ingest and display an antigen if it does not match its receptor.
Using a microfluidic device, MIT researchers were able to overcome this genetically programmed barrier to antigen uptake by squeezing the B cells.
Through ellsqueeze, the device platform originally developed at MIT, the researchers pass a suspension of B cells and target antigen through tiny, parallel channels etched on a chip.
A positive-pressure system moves the suspension through these channels which gradually narrow, applying a gentle pressure to the B cells.
This queezeopens small, temporary holes in their membranes, allowing the target antigen to enter by diffusion.
This process effectively loads the cells with antigens to prime a response of CD8 or illert cells,
which can then kill cancer cells or other target cells. The researchers studied the squeezed B cells in culture
and found that they could expand antigen-specific T cells at least as well as existing methods using antibody-coated beads.
As proof of concept, the researchers then transferred squeezed B cells and antigen-specific T cells into mice
observing that the squeezed B cells could expand T cells in the spleen and in lymph nodes. The researchers also say that this is the first method that decouples antigen delivery from B-cell activation.
A b cell becomes activated when ingesting its antigen or when encountering a foreign stimulus that forces it to ingest nearby antigen.
This activation causes B cells to carry out very specific functions, which has limited options for B-cell-based vaccine programming.
Using Cellsqueeze circumvents this problem, and by being able to separately configure delivery and activation,
researchers have greater control over vaccine design. Gail Bishop a professor of microbiology at the University of Iowa Carver School of medicine and director of the school Center for Immunology and Immune-Based Diseases, says that this paper presents a reative new approach with considerable potential in the development
of antigen-presenting cell vaccines.?The antigen-presenting capabilities of B cells have often been underestimated, but they are being appreciated increasingly for their practical advantages in therapies,
says Bishop, who was involved not in this research. his new technical approach permits loading B cells effectively with virtually any antigen
and has the additional benefit of targeting the antigens to the CD8 T-cell presentation pathway, thus facilitating the activation of the killer T cells desired in many clinical applications. ain squeezearmon Sharei, now a visiting scientist at the Koch Institute,
developed Cellsqueeze while he was a graduate student in the laboratories of Klavs Jensen, the Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering,
and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor and a member of the Koch Institute.
Sharei, Jensen, and Langer are also authors of this paper. In a separate study published last month in the journal PLOS ONE, Sharei and his colleagues first demonstrated that Cellsqueeze can deliver functional macromolecules into immune cells.
The platform has benefits over existing delivery methods, including electroporation and genetically engineered viruses, which are limited to delivering nucleic acids.
While nucleic acids can code a cell for a target antigen these indirect methods have drawbacks:
They have limited ability in coding for difficult-to-identify antigens, and using nucleic acids bears a risk for accidental genome editing.
These methods are also toxic, and can cause cell damage and death. By delivering proteins directly into cells with minimal toxicity,
Cellsqueeze avoids these shortcomings and, in this new study, demonstrates promise as a versatile platform for creating more effective cell-based vaccines. ur dream is to spawn out a whole class of therapies
which involve taking out your own cells, telling them what to do, and putting them back into your body to fight your disease,
whatever that may be, Sharei says. After developing Cellsqueeze at MIT, Sharei co-founded SQZ Biotech in 2013 to further develop
Future stepsthe researchers say they now plan to refine their B-cell-based vaccine to optimize distribution and function of the immune cells in the body.
A b-cell-based approach could also reduce the amount of patient blood required to prepare a vaccine.
patients receiving cell-based vaccines must have drawn blood over several hours each time a new dose must be prepared.
and cost required to engineer cell-based vaccines. e envision a future system, if we can take advantage of its microfluidic nature,
you could do it in your hospital or your doctor office. s the biology and technology become further refined,
the authors say that their approach could potentially be a more efficient, more effective, and less expensive method for developing cell-based therapies for patients. own the road,
you could potentially get enough cells from just a normal syringe-based blood draw, run it through a bedside device that has the antigen you want to vaccinate against,
and then you have the vaccine, Szeto says. This research was funded by the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund through the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of General medicine Sciences
and the Howard hughes medical institute. Publication: Armon Sharei, et al. x Vivo Cytosolic Delivery of Functional Macromolecules to Immune Cells, PLOS One, 2015;
DOI: 10.1371/journal. pone. 0118803source: Kevin Leonardi, Koch Instituteimage: SQZ Biotec 8
#CCNE1 Gene Turns Back Cellular Clock Yale researchers have discovered a gene that turns back the cellular clock,
and one day develop customized cell therapies for individual patients. The Yale team used a new form of transciptome analysis that allowed them to more fully explore impact of all types of RNA on cell reprogramming.
releasing a bit of stress, and making it easier for a second atom to climb out of a trough
a discovery that could have therapeutic potential for diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic diseases. Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists have found a way to both make more energy-burning human brown fat cells
and make the cells themselves more active, a discovery that could have therapeutic potential for diabetes, obesity,
and other metabolic diseases. Unlike energy-storing white, or ad, fat cells, oodbrown fat cells make a protein called UCP1 that converts energy stored in glucose
and fatty acids into heat to keep the body warm. When active brown fat cells can also use energy stored by white fat cells,
and at Harvard-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center and led by HSCI principal faculty member Yu-Hua Tseng,
The research was published online today in the journal Nature Medicine. Tseng collaborated with HSCI Lee Rubin and researchers at the National institutes of health, the Joslin, Boston University, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital,
and Fudan University in China. Knowing which genes control UCP1 should help scientists develop therapies. e could take fat samples from patients undergoing liposuction
and we could purify this specific population of progenitor cells, keeping only those that would eventually make highly active brown fat cells,
Tseng hopes this technique could eventually replace invasive procedures such as liposuction and gastric bypass surgery.
Tseng believes cell therapy would be uch safer and much less invasive. ontrolling the genes might allow scientists to make mediocre brown fat cells work better.
This could potentially allow the brown fat cells to remove the high numbers of circulating glucose associated with type 2 diabetes
and circulating fatty acids and triglycerides that are the hallmark of metabolic syndrome. y further understanding how adipose cells become thermogenically active,
we may discover novel therapeutics for the treatment of obesity and metabolic disease, said Chad Cowan, an HSCI principal faculty member who, among other things,
also studies the therapeutic potential of brown fat cells. In 2014, Cowan identified two drugs with the potential to convert stem cells that make white fat into those that would make brown. his latest study gives us new tools and targets to use in the battle against obesity
Cowan said. Publication: Ruidan Xue, et al. lonal analyses and gene profiling identify genetic biomarkers of the thermogenic potential of human brown and white preadipocytes, Nature Medicine, 2015;
doi: 10.1038/nm. 3881source: Hannah Robbins, Harvard Gazetteimage: Tseng Laboratory, Joslin Diabetes Cente T
#Deriving Power Directly from Evaporation Eva, the first evaporation-powered car, rolls along, thanks to a moisture mill a turbine engine driven by water evaporating from wet paper strips lining its walls.
Eva is one of the many devices created to harness evaporation energy. Credit: Sahin Laboratory, Columbia University An immensely powerful yet invisible force pulls water from the earth to the top of the tallest redwood
While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent,
-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.
Such devices could be used to diagnose diseases, especially skin conditions, or to detect environmental pollutants and food conditions,
or analyzing tissue samples for biomedical research and diagnostics. Replacing that bulky optical equipment with quantum dots allowed the MIT team to shrink spectrometers to about the size of a U s. quarter,
The new technique harnesses the regenerative capacity of stem cells to generate an immune response to the virus. The findings were published today in the journal Molecular Therapy. e hope this approach could one day allow HIV-positive individuals to reduce
and a member of the Broad Stem Cell Research center. e also think this approach could possibly be extended to other diseases.
and an associate professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of medicine at UCLA. Kitchen and his colleagues were the first to report the use of an engineered molecule called a chimeric antigen receptor,
In a healthy immune system, T cells can usually rid the body of viral or bacterial infection.
which is a two-part receptor that recognizes an antigen, was engineered to be carried by T cells
As a result, HIV infection causes disease similar to that in humans. The researchers found that the CAR-carrying blood stem cells successfully turned into functional T cells that could kill HIV-infected cells in the mice.
The findings strongly suggest that stem cell-based gene therapy with a CAR may be a feasible and effective treatment for chronic HIV infection in humans.
This kills the T cells and weakens the immune system so much that the body can fight even a simple infection.
and millions more at risk of infection, do not have adequate access to prevention and treatment,
and there is still no practical cure, said Jerome Zack, professor of medicine and of microbiology,
immunology and molecular genetics in the UCLA David Geffen School of medicine and a co-author of the study. ith the CAR approach,
we aim to change that. Zack is co-director of the UCLA AIDS Institute and is affiliated with UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and a member of the Broad Stem Cell Research center.
Previous studies by Kitchen and Zack demonstrated similar results with other T cell receptors, although it is known that HIV could mutate away from those receptors.
The study first author was Anjie Zhen, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, the UCLA AIDS Institute and the Broad Stem Cell Research center.
IV-specific Immunity Derived From Chimeric Antigen Receptor-engineered Stem Cells, Molecular Therapy,(8 june 2015;
The robot body transitions from soft to hard, reducing the stress where the rigid electronic components join the body
Bobak Mosadegh of Weill Cornell Medical College; and, as noted, Whitesides of Harvard and the Wyss Institute.
#Yale Researchers Successfully Treat Eczema with Rheumatoid arthritis Drug A team of scientists at Yale university used a rheumatoid arthritis drug to successfully treated patients with moderate to severe eczema.
The same rheumatoid arthritis drug (tofacitinib citrate) has shown recently to reverse two other disfiguring skin conditions, vitiligo and alopecia areata.
The research findings are published early online in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
Eczema (atopic dermatitis) is a chronic condition that causes severe itching and leaves the skin red and thickened.
such as steroid creams and oral medicines, commonly fail to relieve symptoms in patients with moderate to severe eczema.
Based on current scientific models of eczema biology, assistant professor of dermatology Dr. Brett King. hypothesized that a drug approved for rheumatoid arthritis,
would interrupt the immune response that causes eczema. In the new study, King and his colleagues report that treatment with the drug led to dramatic improvement in six patients with moderate to severe eczema who had tried previously conventional therapies without success. During treatment all six
patients reported significant reduction in itch as well as improved sleep. The redness and thickening of the skin diminished
King and fellow Yale dermatologist Dr. Brittany Craiglow had shown previously that tofacitinib citrate regrows hair in patients with an autoimmune-related form of hair loss called alopecia areata.
They also published findings reporting the successful treatment of a patient with vitiligo, which can leave widespread irregular white patches all over the body.
The new study suggests that a change in the standard of care for eczema a condition for
which there is no targeted therapy may be on the horizon, say the researchers. czema affects millions of children
and adults in the United states, said King. hopeful we are entering a whole new era in treatment. he researchers note that further research is needed to confirm the treatment long-term efficacy and safety for eczema patients f
because the materials can assemble in water instead of more toxic organic solutions that are used widely today. nce you make the materials,
Removing these toxic materials which include pesticides and endocrine disruptors such as bisphenol A (BPA) with existing methods is often expensive and time-consuming.
for Integrative Cancer Research. Eliana Martins Lima, of the Federal University of Goiás, is the other co-author.
Brandl says. hen we came up with the idea to use our particles to remove toxic chemicals, pollutants,
minimizing the risks of leaving toxic secondary products to persist in, say, a body of water. nce they switch to this macro situation where theye big clumps,
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 multidisciplinary team at Yale, led by Yale Cancer Center members, has defined a subgroup of genetic mutations that are present in a significant number of melanoma skin cancer cases.
Their findings shed light on an important mutation in this deadly disease, and may lead to more targeted anticancer therapies.
The study is published in Nature Genetics. The role of mutations in numerous genes and genomic changes in the development of melanoma a skin cancer with over 70
000 new cases reported in the United states each year is established well and continues to be the focus of intense research.
Yet in approximately 30%of melanoma cases the genetic abnormalities are unclear. To deepen understanding of melanoma mutations,
the Yale team conducted a comprehensive analysis using whole-exome sequencing of more than 200 melanoma samples from patients with the disease.
The multidisciplinary team drawing on their expertise in genetics, cancer, computational biology, pharmacology, and other disciplines also tested the response of tumor cells with specific mutations to anticancer drugs.
The researchers confirmed that a gene known as NF1 is a ajor playerin the development of skin cancer. he key finding is that roughly 45%of melanomas that do not harbor the known BRAF or NRAS mutations display loss of NF1 function,
which leads to activation of the same cancer-causing pathway, said Dr. Michael Krauthammer, associate professor of pathology and the study corresponding author.
Additionally, researchers observed that melanoma patients with the NF1 mutation were had older and a greater number of mutations in the tumors.
These include mutations in the same pathway, collectively known as RASOPATHY genes. Yet mutations in NF1 are not sufficient to cause skin cancer,
said Ruth Halaban, senior research scientist in dermatology, a member of Yale Cancer Center, and lead author of the study. oss of NF1 requires more accompanying changes to make a tumor,
she explained. ur study identified changes in about 100 genes that are present only in the malignant cells
and are likely to be causative. This panel of genes can now be used in precision medicine to diagnose malignant lesions
and can be applied to personalized cancer treatment. By testing the response of the melanoma samples to two cancer drugs,
the researchers also determined that, in addition to loss of NF1, multiple factors need to be tested to predict the response to the drugs. t opens the door to more research,
said Halaban, who is also principal investigator at Yale SPORE in Skin cancer. Other Yale authors include Yong Kong
Antonella Bacchiocchi, Perry Evans, Natapol Pornputtapong, en Wu, James P. Mccusker, Shuangge Ma, Elaine Cheng, Robert Straub, Merdan Serin, Dr
. arcus W. Bosenberg, Dr. Stephan Ariyan, Dr. Deepak Narayan, Dr. Mario Sznol, Dr. Harriet M. Kluger, Shrikant Mane, Joseph Schlessinger,
and Dr. Richard P. Lifton. The study was supported by the Yale SPORE in Skin cancer, funded by the National Cancer Institute, U s. National institutes of health, under award number 1 P50 CA121974;
the Melanoma Research Alliance; Gilead sciences, Inc.;the Howard hughes medical institute; the Department of Dermatology; and the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Publication: Michael Krauthammer, et al, xome sequencing identifies recurrent mutations in NF1 and RASOPATHY genes in sun-exposed melanomas, Nature Genetics, 2015;
doi: 10.1038/ng. 3361 Source: Ziba Kashef, Yale Universit
#First Direct evidence of the Formation Process of Brown dwarfs Using the Very Large Array, an international team of astronomers has discovered jets of material ejected by still-forming young brown dwarfs,
revealing the first direct evidence that brown dwarfs are produced by a scaled-down version of the same process that produces stars.
The astronomers studied a sample of still-forming brown dwarfs in a star-forming region some 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus,
Kenya has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world at least 10 times that of most countries.
Kenya offers free Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) at clinics throughout the country, but the problem has been a lack of access.
A connection that saves lives Qualcomm is changing that by providing something that you won find in a typical medical bag:
Clinics have to track their drugs, generate tedious reports to get new supplies and deliver those reports to central facilities.
the clinic wouldn get the drugs it needed to treat its patients. The 3g technology has allowed clinics to computerize much of their administrative work,
streamlining the submission process and saving time. The time needed to prepare three monthly reports dropped from 11.6 hours to less than half an hour.
Projects run the gamut from health care and public safety to education and entrepreneurship. A project in India is helping to educate migrant children.
or used in medical treatments. Other cities using the system benefit from New york work and they can provide their own suggestions.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011