think about public health it impacts all of those areas. We think of this technology as a tremendous way to sort of improve the system. he company ags,
according to statistics from the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists. ay mom is in the hospital
who also has a Masters of Public health degree from Harvard university, a big component of this company is to empower consumers to understand what they are putting into their bodies,
#Lab on a chip turns smart phones into mobile disease clinics Smart phones can pay our bills,
The researchers conducted a field test of the device at three Rwandan community clinics, where health care workers rapidly screened 96 patients for HIV
and active and latent forms of syphilis. Compared with gold standard laboratory tests, the dongle was 96%as accurate in detecting infections,
which they hope will let mobile clinics and health workers provide rapid and reliable disease screening in the remotest areas of the world r
increasingly feared in hospitals for their resistance to existing drugs. But the authors suggest it could be of great value to people fighting MRSA, tuberculosis,
He was treated at several clinics before being diagnosed with MERS on 20 may. Several countries have seen such imported cases
But the Korean patient appears to have infected at least 22 family members, health care workers, and fellow patients at a hospital where he was treated from 15 may to 17 may.
The hospital's name has not been revealed. No special precautions were taken during that time, because the patient had not yet been diagnosed.
The early phase of the disease, just after hospitalization and when symptoms are getting worse,
is a lapse in infection control measures at the hospital, Ben Embarek says. The SARS virus,
and placed him in isolation in Huizhou Municipal Central Hospital on 27 may. He tested positive for MERS on 29 may.
but for developing vaccines and studying links between viruses and chronic disease. his is really a technical tour de force,
and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical school wanted to develop a test that could look at every current or past infection in one fell swoop.
That observation could inform future vaccine development, he says. Whether the test really catches everything is up for debate,
a cancer biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center in Dallas. Researchers have used magnets before to levitate whole creatures,
That makes them attractive as backup power sources for hospitals and manufacturing plants as well as for producing distributed power systems not connected to the grid.
says immunologist Richard Koup, deputy director of the Vaccine Research center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland,
Conventional MRIS found in hospitals work by inducing a magnetic field gradient across your entire body.
"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."
This week MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) announce the launch of the Center for Microbiome Informatics
Under their guidance the center will seek to develop a regional ecosystem together with other hospitals universities and research institutions.
A new study from MIT Brigham and Women s Hospital and Johns hopkins university suggests that delivering chemotherapy directly into the brain cavity may offer a better way to treat tumors that have metastasized to the brain.
at Brigham and Women s Hospital and now an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical school.
In the mid-2000s, a urologist at Boston Children Hospital contacted Cima at the behest of Institute Professor Robert Langer with a plea:
Massachusetts General Hospital; Institut Curie in Paris; the Heinrich-Pette Institute and the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg Germany;
who are demonstrating delivery of vaccines in Africa. Delta Drone in France is using the platform for open-air mining operations,
which can be obtained with a finger prick making the procedure minimally invasive and much easier for health care workers than drawing blood intravenously.
such as electronic-prescription and pill-barcoding systems at hospitals in their native Iceland and other European countries.
But all that time spent in hospitals soon opened their eyes to a major health care issue:
Commercialized through startup Mint Solutions Medeye has now been used for a year in hospitals in The netherlands where the startup is based) garnering significant attention from the medical community.
and working with a Dutch health care insurance company to bring the Medeye to 15 hospitals across the country as well as Belgium the United kingdom and Germany.
About 15 years ago some hospitals began using barcode systems which Reynisson and Helgason actually helped install in some Dutch and German hospitals.
These systems also require nurses to use a handheld scanner to scan a patient s wristband
Hospitals have to make all these things work together and it s hard for small and medium hospitals to afford.
No one is selling turn-key barcode systems. That s where Medeye is truly unique Helgason says:
As an entire system that requires no change in a hospital s workflow or logistics it s more usable and more accessible in health care facilities.
when a nurse at the Dutch hospital demonstrated the Medeye for department heads on a random patient.
At the same time he started taking heed of MIT s burgeoning startup ecosystem prompting him to contact his longtime medical device colleague.
But a 2010 demonstration at a Dutch hospital of an early prototype a bulkier version of the Medeye with off-the-shelf parts constructed at MIT changed their perception.
The hospital had to identify about 250 small white pills of different medications that in fact all looked the same.
That s when we realized what a change it would be for a hospital to collect data
At the core of the startup is this belief that better information technology in hospitals can both increase efficiency
It can take up to a year to determine the function of a single gene which has slowed efforts to develop new more targeted drugs and vaccines.
whether it s drugs or vaccines says Niles the senior author of a paper describing the technique in the Aug 10 online edition of Nature Methods.
which could generate new drug and vaccine targets. I think the impact could be quite huge Niles says.
the breathing of an infant in the neonatal ward of a hospital, or the pulse in a subject wrist.
says Chris Dainty a professor at the University college London Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital.
that brings together faculty from MIT Harvard university Harvard-affiliated hospitals and collaborators worldwide. Stanley s commitment to support the work of the Broad Institute will consist of annual gifts during his lifetime followed by a bequest with a total current value exceeding $650 million.
the first vaccine against cervical cancer; and many other breakthroughs. Instead of retiring Scolnick took on a new challenge:
Scolnick served as a member of Hyman s National Advisory Mental health Council from 1998 to 2002
and institutions it brings together faculty from MIT Harvard and the five major Harvard-affiliated hospitals:
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center Boston Children s Hospital Brigham and Women s Hospital Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Launched in 2007 by a $100 million commitment from the Stanley Medical Research Institute the Stanley Center has extensive collaborations with investigators at MIT Harvard and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals as well as with investigators around the world.
and its affiliated hospitals and the visionary Los angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe L. Broad the Broad Institute includes faculty professional staff
This is where we re Going with an expected rise of wireless charging one promising future application Soljacic sees is in medical devices especially implanted ventricular assist devices (or heart pumps) that support blood flow.
Ralph Weissleder a professor at Harvard Medical school and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Molecular Imaging Research says this type of sensor is a novel way to potentially track how cancer patients
for example, if a refrigerated vaccine has ever been exposed to temperatures too high or low. The paper lead authors are MIT postdoc Jiseok Lee and graduate student Paul Bisso.
however, is most likely in health care, with the potential for clinical diagnostics or rapid detection of contamination in hospital rooms with the aim of decreasing the 1. 7 million cases of hospital-associated infections recorded in the United states each year.
With the assay, Lu says Sample6 hopes to bring synthetic biology, and specifically phages, to microbial detection across many fields.
a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical school and Massachusetts General Hospital. ur knowledge about the abundance of extracellular matrix proteins in tumors has been limited.
Extending this technology to detection by strip tests is a big leap forward in bringing its use to outpatient clinics and decentralized health settings.
whether it s in your home or in a pharmacy clinic could really be transformative Bhatia says.
and for our understanding of how infections take hold in medical devices. The findings the result of microscopic analysis of bacteria inside microfluidic devices were made by MIT postdoc Roberto Rusconi former MIT postdoc Jeffrey Guasto (now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts
#Hitchhiking vaccines boost immunity Many vaccines, including those for influenza, polio, and measles, consist of a killed or disabled version of a virus. However, for certain diseases,
this type of vaccine is ineffective, or just too risky. An alternative, safer approach is made a vaccine of small fragments of proteins produced by a disease-causing virus or bacterium.
This has worked for some diseases, but in many cases these vaccines don provoke a strong enough response.
Now a team of engineers at MIT has developed a new way to deliver such vaccines directly to the lymph nodes
where huge populations of immune cells reside: These vaccines hitch a ride to the lymph nodes by latching on to the protein albumin, found in the bloodstream.
In tests with mice, such vaccines produced very strong immune responses, the researchers report in the Feb 16 online edition of Nature. he lymph nodes are where all the action happens in a primary immune response.
T cells and B cells reside there, and that where you need to get the vaccine to get an immune response.
The more material you can get there, the better, says Darrell Irvine, a professor of biological engineering and of materials science and engineering,
This approach could be especially useful for delivering HIV vaccines and for stimulating the body immune system to attack tumors,
Free ride Vaccines made of protein or sugar fragments, also known as subunit vaccines, have been successful against a few diseases, such as hepatitis and diphtheria.
To develop subunit vaccines for other diseases, scientists have tried targeting them to lymph nodes using nanoparticles to deliver them,
or tagging them with antibodies specific to immune cells in the lymph nodes. However these strategies have had limited only success,
because it is difficult to get all of the vaccine to the lymph nodes without some escaping to the rest of the body,
immune cells in the lymph nodes efficiently capture the albumin. e realized that might be an approach that you could try to copy in a vaccine design a vaccine molecule that binds to albumin
so the researchers added a fatty tail called a lipid to their vaccine peptides. They created a few different vaccines
targeting HIV, melanoma, and cervical cancer, and tested them in mice. Each one generated a large population of memory T cells specific to the viral
one in three T cells in the blood was a vaccine-specific T cell, which is something you usually only see with vaccines delivered by viruses. The albumin-targeted vaccines provoked immune responses five to 10 times stronger than those generated by the peptide antigens alone.
The melanoma vaccine slowed cancer growth and the cervical cancer vaccine shrank tumors. t certainly is an interesting approach,
and the results are very convincing, says Pal Johansen, a professor of dermatology at University Hospital Zurich who was not part of the research team. oth the effect on the stimulated immune responses
and the consequential suppression of tumor growth are results that would suggest further development and clinical testing.
Controlled inflammation The researchers also tested this delivery strategy with an adjuvant a molecule that enhances the immune responses of vaccines.
Targeting a commonly used adjuvant called Cpg to albumin dramatically boosted the resulting inflammatory response.
The researchers are planning to test this method to deliver HIV vaccines in nonhuman primates,
and they are also working on further developing cancer vaccines, including one for lung cancer. The research was funded by the Koch Institute Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute, the National institutes of health, the U s. Department of defense,
and the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard university l
#Boosting science math technology and ethics in Tibetan communities To many Westerners science monks and technology may not be an obvious trio.
Drug companies spend years testing safety and dosage in the clinic, only to find in Phase III clinical efficacy trials that target compounds have little to no benefit.
#Cochlear implants with no exterior hardware Cochlear implants medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf.
The researchersdesign exploits the mechanism of a different type of medical device known as a middle-ear implant.
that sheds empirical light on the inner workings of health care in the U s. The study takes advantage of Oregon recent use of a lottery to assign access to Medicaid, the government-backed health-care plan for low-income
along with Katherine Baicker, a professor at the Harvard School of Public health. The study, which is being published today in the journal Science,
However, Medicaid also lowers the out-of-pocket costs of other types of health care, such as primary-care doctors.
Some policy analysts have suggested that expanding Medicaid could reduce emergency department visits by the formerly uninsured by bringing them into more regular contact with primary-care doctors and clinics for preventive care.
#Creating a permanent bacteria barrier Any medical device implanted in the body attracts bacteria, proteins, and other microbes to its surface, causing infections and thrombosis (blood clotting) that lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths annually.
and CEO David Lucchino MBA 6 is developing a novel biomaterial for implanted medical devices that permanently barricades these troublesome microbes from the device surface.
when applied to a medical device, sprouts a thicket of polymers that attract water, creating an impenetrable barrier for microbes.
In 2012, Semprus sold to a medical device-manufacturing giant for an amount that could reach $80 million.
and recently earned clearance from the Food and Drug Administration as a medical device deemed safe and effective for commercial distribution in the United states. It also recently received designation as a product meeting European union standards of health, safety,
a chemical engineering Phd student, was charged with developing medical devices that could permanently be inserted in the body without triggering an immune response in other words,
creating medical devices that ooked more human, Loose says. Loose developed a means of applying naturally occurring antibiotics,
and human sweat on medical devices. These peptides would puncture bacteria that came near, and microbes would have trouble developing resistance to them.
So they ent to schoolon the medical device market, canvassing hospitals to meet patients and to talk with nurses and doctors about unmet clinical needs. e learned quickly that the most successful entrepreneurs are good listeners,
Loose says, they were ahead of the curve in addressing the nmet needof the medical devices market. e realized an unmet need that was going to grow over the next few years
Blood transfusions can sometimes prevent such attacks, but there are currently no good ways to predict when a vaso-occlusive crisis,
Joseph Bonventre, chief of the renal unit and director of the bioengineering division at Brigham and Women Hospital in Boston, agrees that the study represents an important step toward a more personalized approach. ou want the best adhesive possible,
annually in unnecessary health care costs from additional hospital visits and other issues. Failure to follow prescriptions, the study also found, causes around 125,000 deaths annually and up to 10 percent of all hospitalizations.
and an expert in nanoengineering for health care and medical applications. hen you think about field deployment,
The research team was comprised of scientists from the Technion Rappaport Faculty of medicine Rambam Medical center and the Center of Excellence in Exposure Science and Environmental Health (TCEEH Environmental exposure to nanoparticles is becoming unavoidable due to the rapid expansion of nanotechnology says the study's lead author Prof.
Because our research demonstrates a clear cardiovascular health risk associated with this trend steps need to be taken to help ensure that potential health
For example conventional manufacturing techniques are not practical for medical devices that need to be fit to a patient's particular shape
Researchers at the University of Basel and The swiss Tropical and Public health Institute have developed now so-called nanomimics of host cell membranes that trick the parasites.
This could lead to novel treatment and vaccination strategies in the fight against malaria and other infectious diseases.
For many infectious diseases no vaccine currently exists. In addition resistance against currently used drugs is spreading rapidly.
and vaccines strategies in the future says Adrian Najer first-author of the study. Since many other pathogens use the same host cell receptor for invasion the nanomimics might also be used against other infectious diseases.
According to TAU doctoral student and research team member Dr. Lilach Bareket there are already medical devices that attempt to treat visual impairment by sending sensory signals to the brain.
#Breakthrough in flexible electronics enabled by inorganic-based laser lift off Flexible electronics have been touted as the next generation in electronics in various areas ranging from consumer electronics to bio-integrated medical devices.
Das and Walker Julie AK Mcdonald (Kingston General Hospital) Dr. Petrof (KGH) and Emma Allen-Vercoe (University of Guelph) were published in the Journal of Nanomedicine and Nanotechnology.
#Paper electronics could make health care more accessible Flexible electronic sensors based on paper an inexpensive material have the potential to some day cut the price of a wide range of medical tools from helpful robots
"Our material's combination of injectability, rapid mechanical recovery, physiological stability and the ability to promote coagulation result in a hemostat for treating incompressible wounds in out-of-hospital, emergency situations,
When an elderly patient presents at a clinic it's a huge challenge because you have no idea
""Getting to the clinic will take a long time, but that is what keeps us motivated, "Li said d
Just as accurate and ten times less expensive than equipment currently used in hospitals, this nanoscale device has an optical system that can rapidly gauge the optimal dose of methotrexate a patient needs,
Until now, monitoring has been done in hospitals with a device using fluorescent bioassays to measure light polarization produced by a drug sample."
The accuracy of the measurements taken by the new device were compared with those produced by equipment used at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal."
#See-through one-atom-thick carbon electrodes powerful tool to study brain disorders Researchers from the Perelman School of medicine and School of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have used graphene
#'Stealth'nanoparticles could improve cancer vaccines Cancer vaccines have emerged recently as a promising approach for killing tumor cells before they spread.
Now scientists have developed a new way to deliver vaccines that successfully stifled tumor growth when tested in laboratory mice.
And the key they report in the journal ACS Nano is in the vaccine's unique stealthy nanoparticles.
Hiroshi Shiku Naozumi Harada and colleagues explain that most cancer vaccine candidates are designed to flag down immune cells called macrophages and dendritic cells that signal killer T cells to attack tumors.
But how could one get a vaccine to these special immune cells without first being gobbled up by the macrophages
When molecules for signaling killer T cells were put inside the nanoparticles they hindered tumor growth far better than existing vaccines.
Hitchhiking vaccines boost immunity More information: Nanogel-Based Immunologically Stealth Vaccine Targets Macrophages in the Medulla of Lymph node
and Induces Potent Antitumor Immunity ACS Nano 2014 8 (9) pp 9209#9218. DOI: 10.1021/nn502975r Because existing therapeutic cancer vaccines provide only a limited clinical benefit a different vaccination strategy is necessary to improve vaccine efficacy.
We developed a nanoparticulate cancer vaccine by encapsulating a synthetic long peptide antigen within an immunologically inert nanoparticulate hydrogel (nanogel) of cholesteryl pullulan (CHP.
After subcutaneous injection to mice the nanogel-based vaccine was transported efficiently to the draining lymph node and was engulfed preferentially by medullary macrophages
but was sensed not by other macrophages and dendritic cells (so-called immunologically stealth mode). Although the function of medullary macrophages in T cell immunity has been unexplored so far these macrophages effectively cross-primed the vaccine-specific CD8+T cells in the presence of a Toll-like receptor (TLR) agonist as an adjuvant.
The nanogel-based vaccine significantly inhibited in vivo tumor growth in the prophylactic and therapeutic settings compared to another vaccine formulation using a conventional delivery system incomplete Freund's adjuvant.
We also revealed that lymph node macrophages were highly responsive to TLR stimulation which may underlie the potency of the macrophage-oriented nanogel-based vaccine.
These results indicate that targeting medullary macrophages using the immunologically stealth nanoparticulate delivery system is an effective vaccine strategy e
#Nanoparticles accumulate quickly in wetland sediment (Phys. org) A Duke university team has found that nanoparticles called single-walled carbon nanotubes accumulate quickly in the bottom sediments of an experimental wetland setting an action they say could indirectly damage the aquatic food chain.
#Nanotubes help healing hearts keep the beat (Phys. org) Carbon nanotubes serve as bridges that allow electrical signals to pass unhindered through new pediatric heart-defect patches invented at Rice university and Texas Children's Hospital.
This stemmed from talking with Dr. Pasquali's lab as well as interventional cardiologists in the Texas Medical center Jacot said.
Pasquali noted that Rice's nanotechnology expertise and Texas Medical center membership offers great synergy. This is a good example of how it's much better for an application person like Dr. Jacot to work with experts who know how to handle nanotubes rather than trying to go solo as many do said he.
which could lead to an associated reduction in health risks. Supercapacitors are Bluevine Graphene Industries'second application under development for its Folium graphene.
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.
#Researcher's nanoparticle key to new malaria vaccine A self-assembling nanoparticle designed by a UCONN professor is the key component of a potent new malaria vaccine that is showing promise in early tests.
For years, scientists trying to develop a malaria vaccine have been stymied by the malaria parasite's ability to transform itself
The key to the vaccine's success lies in the nanoparticle's perfect icosahedral symmetry (think of the pattern on a soccer ball)
In tests with mice, the vaccine was 90-100 percent effective in eradicating the Plasmodium falciparum parasite
the world's most advanced malaria vaccine candidate currently undergoing phase 3 clinical trials, which is the last stage of testing before licensing."
"Both vaccines are similar, it's just that the density of the RTS, S protein displays is much lower than ours,
"The homogeneity of our vaccine is much higher, which produces a stronger immune system response. That is why we are confident that ours will be an improvement."
"With RTS, S, only about 14 percent of the vaccine's protein is from the malaria parasite.
The search for a malaria vaccine is one of the most important research projects in global public health.
It took the researchers more than 10 years to finalize the precise assembly of the nanoparticle as the critical carrier of the vaccine
"Testing the vaccine's efficacy was difficult because the parasite that causes malaria in humans only grows in humans,
and put in its DNA a piece of DNA from the human malaria parasite that we wanted our vaccine to attack.
That allowed us to conduct inexpensive mouse studies to test the vaccine before going to expensive human trials."
A request for an additional $7 million in funding from the U s army to conduct the next phase of vaccine development, including manufacturing
"We are on schedule to manufacture the vaccine for human use early next year, "says Lanar."
or more before the vaccine is available for licensure and public use, Lanar says. Martin Edlund, CEO of Malaria No more, a New york-based nonprofit focused on fighting deaths from malaria,
says,"This research presents a promising new approach to developing a malaria vaccine. Innovative work such as what's being done at the University of Connecticut puts us closer than we've ever been to ending one of the world's oldest
holds the patent on the self-assembling nanoparticle used in the malaria vaccine. Burkhard is also exploring other potential uses for the nanoparticle,
including a vaccine that will fight animal flu and one that will help people with nicotine addiction.
Professor Mazhar Khan from UCONN's Department of Pathobiology is collaborating with Burkhard on the animal flu vaccine e
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