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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2564

I suggest they connect with DARPA or Dr Phillip Ball on QBS.

This is undoubtedly relief for certain medical conditions, but the potential for misuse, harm and control demands an ethical debate to define the limits. Unfortunately, Technocrats shun such discussions. ⁃ TN Editor.

In labs testing how brain implants could help people with physical disabilities, tales of success can be bittersweet.

Experiments like those that let a paralyzed person swig coffee using a robotic arm, or that let blind people “see” spots of light, have proven the huge potential of computers that interface with the brain. But the implanted electrodes used in such trials eventually become useless, as scar tissue forms that degrades their electrical connection to brain cells (see “The Thought Experiment”).

Continue reading “Harvard Medical School Is Perfecting Brain Computer Interface Implants” | >

In Brief Sooam Biotech Research Foundation has cloned over 800 dogs since 2006, offering the service to bring your dead dog back for $100,000. Apart from their popular dog cloning service, they also clone cattle and pigs for medical research and breed preservation.

The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation can reincarnate your dead dog, a service that would delight pet lovers—for $100,000.

“These people have very a strong bond with their pets… and cloning provides a psychological alternative to the traditional method of just letting the pet go and keeping their memory,” said Sooam researcher and spokesman Wang Jae-Woong.

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Expensive EpiPen auto-injectors dominate the market for emergency allergy treatment, but a cheaper alternative is now being developed: an epinephrine tablet that dissolves under the tongue.

Last month a congressional committee tore into Mylan CEO Heather Bresch. The charge: jacking up the price of EpiPens, her company’s signature product. Those price hikes left some allergy sufferers without access to emergency epinephrine, the drug that saves people who go into anaphylactic shock.

Mylan has control of the marketplace because other companies have a hard time competing with the EpiPen’s patented design. Those who have tried have mostly offered up alternative types of auto-injectors, which generally flop.

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Patently Apple’s other blog called Patently Mobile has covered the advances of flexible displays from Samsung for years. You could check out some of the major ones here: (one, two, three and four. The most interesting ones relate to a possible scrollable smart device. Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals their work on flexible displays and electronics that will extend to specialty applications. Beyond applying their revealed technology to known devices such as a smartphone or tablet, Apple see’s the technology being widely adopted into smart clothing, smart windows, applications in vehicles, furniture and more. One of the inventors on the patent previously worked for a company where they made flexible medical devices, skin-mounted epidermal electronics and even next gen flexible processors. So this is a serious invention that is likely to work through the system over time and eventually to market. It’s not just pie in the sky thinking.

Traditional displays and touch sensors mounted in a device may be subject to stress-induced failures. As devices with flexible displays are being considered for the future, Apple has to invent new and improved input-output methodologies to accommodate such displays.

Apple notes that their invention relates to a flexible input-output device such as a display or a display with integrated sensors and haptic output may be formed from an elastomeric substrate layer.

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Electromagnetic pulses lasting one millionth of a millionth of a second may hold the key to advances in medical imaging, communications and drug development. But the pulses, called terahertz waves, have long required elaborate and expensive equipment to use.

Now, researchers at Princeton University have drastically shrunk much of that equipment: moving from a tabletop setup with lasers and mirrors to a pair of microchips small enough to fit on a fingertip.

In two articles recently published in the IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, the researchers describe one microchip that can generate terahertz waves, and a second chip that can capture and read intricate details of these waves.

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Everyone knows prevention is better than a cure, and that’s as true for law enforcement as it is for medicine. But there’s little evidence that a growing trend towards “predictive policing” is the answer, and it could even bake in racial bias.

Police departments faced with tight budgets are increasingly turning to machine learning-enabled software that can sift through crime data to help predict where crimes are likely to occur and who might commit them.

Using statistics in law enforcement is nothing new. A statistical system for tracking crime called Compstat was pioneered in New York in 1994 and quickly became popular elsewhere. Since then, crime has fallen 75 percent in New York, which has been credited by some to the technology. But while Compstat simply helped identify historical hotspots, “predictive policing” uses intelligent algorithms to forecast tomorrow’s hotspots and offenders.

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A biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for disease intersections of arthritis, hypertension, and cancer, today announced that they have entered into a license agreement regarding the Company’s SMARTICLES platform for the delivery of nanoparticles including small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics…

Marina Biotech, Inc. a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for disease intersections of arthritis, hypertension, and cancer, today announced that they have entered into a license agreement regarding the Company’s SMARTICLES platform for the delivery of nanoparticles including small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics. This represents the first time that the Company’s SMARTICLES technologies have been licensed in connection with nanoparticles delivering small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics. Under terms of the agreement, Marina could receive up to $90MM in success based milestones. Further details of the agreement were not disclosed.

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Nice.

Testing treatments for bone cancer tumors may get easier with new enhancements to sophisticated support structures that mimic their biological environment, according to Rice University scientists.

A team led by Rice bioengineer Antonios Mikos has enhanced its three-dimensional printed scaffold to see how Ewing’s sarcoma (bone cancer) cells respond to stimuli, especially shear stress, the force experienced by tumors as viscous fluid such as blood flows through bone. The researchers determined the structure of a scaffold, natural or not, has a very real effect on how cells express signaling proteins that help cancer grow.

Sarcoma Cells on a scaffold

Sarcoma (bone cancer) cells proliferate on the surface of a 3D printed scaffold created at Rice University. Experiments at Rice showed that the size of pores in the scaffold, which mimics the extracellular matrix in bone, and the pores’ orientation make a difference in how cells proliferate in the presence of a flowing fluid, like blood. (Image: Mikos Research Group/Rice University)

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