Category: Medical Breakthrough

By Kevin Lin 

Scientists have designed a temporary, battery-free pacemaker that can be broken down by the patient’s body when its work is done, the latest advance in the emerging field of bioelectronics.

In a paper published this week in Nature Biotechnology, researchers report that the device reliably kept the heart’s pace in check in tests on mice, rats, and other animals, as well as in human heart tissue in a dish. And while the research is still in the early stages, the scientists say the pacemaker was able to overcome key limitations of existing devices.

“There are about 1 million people a year who receive pacemaker implantations worldwide. It’s a huge, huge medical field, but mostly pacemakers are permanent,” said Igor Efimov, a biomedical engineer and professor at George Washington University and co-author of the new paper.

Unlike traditional pacemakers, which are left inside a patient for the rest of their life or until the battery dies, a traditional temporary pacemaker is implanted and later removed. The devices are typically for children with congenital heart defects or adults who have had a coronary artery bypass graft, who may need a temporary pacemaker to correct a slowed heart rhythm for only a few days or weeks.

Continue reading… “Scientists devise a battery-free pacemaker that can be absorbed by the body”

Patrick Doherty volunteered for a new medical intervention of gene-editor infusions for the treatment of genetically-based diseases.Patrick Doherty

Patrick Doherty had always been very active. He trekked the Himalayas and hiked trails in Spain.

But about a year and a half ago, he noticed pins and needles in his fingers and toes. His feet got cold. And then he started getting out of breath any time he walked his dog up the hills of County Donegal in Ireland where he lives.

“I noticed on some of the larger hill climbs I was getting a bit breathless,” says Doherty, 65. “So I realized something was wrong.”

Doherty found out he had a rare, but devastating inherited disease — known as transthyretin amyloidosis — that had killed his father. A misshapen protein was building up in his body, destroying important tissues, such as nerves in his hands and feet and his heart.

Continue reading… “He Inherited A Devastating Disease. A CRISPR Gene-Editing Breakthrough Stopped It”

By Vanesa Listek

A team of engineers and health experts led by mechanics professor Ricky Wildman from the University of Nottingham, UK, found a new way to design and manufacture custom medical devices to boost performance and bacterial resistance. Using a combination of multi-material inkjet 3D printing and genetic algorithms, the researchers designed tailored composite artificial body parts and other medical devices with built-in functionality that offer better shape and durability while cutting the risk of bacterial infection at the same time. The study opens the possibility of a new manufacturing concept to produce devices with spatially distributed, customizable material functionalities in a cost-effective manner.

Continue reading… “New Technique Allows Researchers to Custom 3D Print Bacteria-Resistant Medical Devices”

McMaster University researcher Richa Pandey displays new technology that can analyze a medical sample and return an accurate, definitive result in minutes. Credit: McMaster University

The idea of visiting the doctor’s office with symptoms of an illness and leaving with a scientifically confirmed diagnosis is much closer to reality because of new technology developed by researchers at McMaster University.

Engineering, biochemistry and medical researchers from across campus have combined their skills to create a hand-held rapid test for bacterial infections that can produce accurate, reliable results in less than an hour, eliminating the need to send samples to a lab.

Their proof-of-concept research, published today in the journal Nature Chemistry, specifically describes the test’s effectiveness in diagnosing urinary tract infections from real clinical samples. The researchers are adapting the test to detect other forms of bacteria and for the rapid diagnosis of viruses, including COVID-19. They also plan to test its viability for detecting markers of cancer.

Continue reading… “No lab required: New technology can diagnose infections in minutes”

by Barry Fitzgerald , Eindhoven University of Technology

When something is awry with your immune system, your digestion or your endocrine systems, nuclear receptors, as they are called, may well be involved. If need be, the operation of these regulator proteins can be altered with medicinal drugs, but this carries the very real risk of unpleasant side effects. Doctoral candidate Femke Meijer looked for—and found—molecules that might well be used as medications for autoimmune diseases, but with fewer side effects. Meijer defends her thesis at the department of Biomedical Engineering on June 23.

Our body has exactly 48 types of nuclear receptor. These are proteins that float about in our cells and can be activated by all sorts of signal molecules such as hormones. When this happens, the nuclear receptor in question issues an instruction in the cell nucleus to produce other particular proteins. Shutting down or conversely activating these nuclear receptors is the mechanism by which one in six medicines achieves its intended effect. The best-known example is most probably the contraceptive pill. “This acts on the estrogen and progesterone receptors,” says doctoral candidate Femke Meijer.

As part of her research, Meijer studied another nuclear receptor, RORỿt, which regulates the production of cytokines and as such plays a role in the genesis of inflammatory reactions. Certain drugs for autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatism, psoriasis, asthma, and Crohn’s disease, turn this function to their advantage and aim to shut down this nuclear receptor. “They do this by blocking what’s known as its binding site with a molecule, so that this particular nuclear receptor, RORỿt, is deactivated,” explains Meijer.

Continue reading… “New molecules could be used to treat autoimmune diseases in the future”

Stem cells grown over the surface of the microspheres. Credit: University College London

by Mark Greaves , University College London

Biodegradable microspheres can be used to deliver heart cells generated from stem cells to repair damaged hearts after a heart attack, according to new findings by UCL researchers. This type of cell therapy could one day cure debilitating heart failure, which affects an estimated 920,000 people in the UK and continues to rise as more people are surviving a heart attack than ever before.

Scientists have been trying to use stem cells to repair damaged hearts for a number of years. However, these cells often don’t remain in the heart in a healthy state for long enough to provide a sustained benefit.

Now, a UCL team, funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), has grown human stem cell-derived heart cells on tiny microspheres, each only a quarter of a millimeter wide, engineered from biological material. The cells attach to and grow on the microspheres, make connections with each other and are able to beat for up to 40 days in a dish. The small size of the microspheres means they can be easily injected into the heart muscle using a needle.

The researchers have also taken this one step further by developing state-of-the-art technology to visualize the injected microspheres and confirm they remain in place. Barium sulfate (BaSO₄), which shines bright on X-rays and CT scans, was added to the microspheres and injected into rat hearts. Whole body CT scans confirmed that the microspheres remained in place for up to six days after injection.

Continue reading… “Injectable microspheres to repair failing hearts”

Aligned myotubes formed on electrospun extracellular matrix scaffolds produced at Rice University. The staining with fluorescent tags shows cells’ expression of myogenic marker desmin (green), actin (red) and nuclei (blue) after seven days of growth. Credit: Mikos

Original story from Rice University

Rice University bioengineers are fabricating and testing tunable electrospun scaffolds completely derived from decellularized skeletal muscle to promote the regeneration of injured skeletal muscle.

Their paper in Science Advances shows how natural extracellular matrix can be made to mimic native skeletal muscle and direct the alignment, growth and differentiation of myotubes, one of the building blocks of skeletal muscle. The bioactive scaffolds are made in the lab via electrospinning, a high-throughput process that can produce single micron-scale fibers.

The research could ease the burden of performing an estimated 4.5 million reconstructive surgeries per year to repair injuries suffered by civilians and military personnel.

Current methods of electrospinning decellularized muscle require a copolymer to aid in scaffold fabrication. The Rice process does not.

“The major innovation is the ability to prepare scaffolds that are 100% extracellular matrix,” said Rice bioengineer and principal investigator Antonios Mikos. “That’s very important because the matrix includes all the signaling motifs that are important for the formation of the particular tissue.”

Continue reading… “Bio-Inspired Scaffolds Help Promote Muscle Growth”

The scans will allow doctors to diagnose heart problems without invasive procedures

Revolutionary 3D scans that can diagnose coronary heart disease in 20 minutes are being introduced by the NHS.

Tens of thousands of patients every year will be assessed and treated five times faster thanks to the technology.

Continue reading… “New 3D scan finds heart disease in 20 minutes”

by: Virgilio Marin 

(Natural News) Researchers designed a new blood filtration system that uses magnetic nanoparticles to remove pathogens and cancer cells from the blood. Called MediSieve, the system works by connecting a patient to the same machine used for hemodialysis. As blood passes through the machine, magnetic particles selectively bind to harmful molecules present in the blood.

The researchers are currently testing the technology on malaria, a life-threatening disease caused by a parasite. But the technology can also be used to treat other conditions, such as sepsis, leukemia, drug overdose and COVID-19.

“In theory, you can go after almost anything. Poisons, pathogens, viruses, bacteria, anything that we can specifically bind to we can remove. So, it’s a very powerful potential tool,” said George Frodsham, a British engineer and the CEO of MediSieve, the company he founded in London to develop and market the technology.

Continue reading… “New blood filtering system claims to use magnetic nanoparticles to remove pathogens”

Researchers at the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center (HUG-CELL), hosted by the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Biosciences (IB-USP) in Brazil, have developed a technique to reconstruct and produce livers in the laboratory.

The proof-of-concept study was conducted with rat livers. In the next stage of their research, the scientists will adapt the technique for the production of human livers in order in future to increase the supply of these organs for transplantation.

The study was supported by FAPESP and is reported in an article published in Materials Science and Engineering: C. “The plan is to produce human livers in the laboratory to scale. This will avoid having to wait a long time for a compatible donor and reduce the risk of rejection of the transplanted organ,” Luiz Carlos de Caires-Júnior, first author of the article, told Agência FAPESP. He is a postdoctoral fellow of HUG-CELL, one of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) funded by FAPESP.

The methodology is based on decellularization and recellularization, tissue bioengineering techniques developed in recent years to produce organs for transplantation. An organ from a deceased donor, in this case the liver, is treated with various solutions containing detergents or enzymes to remove all the cells from the tissue, leaving only the extracellular matrix with the organ’s original structure and shape. The extracellular matrix is then seeded with cells taken from the patient. The technique avoids immune system reactions and the risk of rejection in the long term.

Continue reading… “Researchers Develop A Technique To Produce Transplantable Livers In The Laboratory”

The part-human, part-monkey embryos were kept alive for 20 days, giving researchers enough time to learn about how animal and human cells communicate

By  Georgia Slater

Scientists have successfully created the first embryos containing both human and monkey cells, an important step in helping researchers find ways to produce organs for transplants.

The results of the groundbreaking experiment, published Thursday in the journal Cell, describe the first mixed-species embryos known as chimeras.

The research team in China was led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who has previously experimented with human and pig embryos. The team injected 25 human stem cells into the embryos of macaque monkeys.

Continue reading… “Scientists Create First Human-Monkey Embryos That Could Potentially Produce Organs for Transplants”