Doctor Antonio Lacy of Hospital Clinic de Barcelona delivers a speech about the first 5G tele-mentored live surgery at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on February 27, 2019. – Phone makers will focus on foldable screens and the introduction of blazing fast 5G wireless networks at the world’s biggest mobile fair as they try to reverse a decline in sales of smartphones.
Barcelona (CNN Business)When a team of doctors at Hospital Clinic Barcelona began removing a cancerous tumor from a patient’s colon on Wednesday, the surgeon overseeing the procedure was over three miles away.
Heart tissue, seeded with induced cardiac cells, matures in a bioreactor that the researchers created.It’s the closest we’ve come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab
Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient’s body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients’ own cells. Now a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has gotten one step closer, using adult skin cells to regenerate functional human heart tissue, according to a study published recently in the journal Circulation Research.
Discovery by Rutgers and other scientists could lead to new antibiotics and anticancer drugs
The 3D structure of McbBCD, an enzyme (protein) that makes the potent antibiotic microcin B17 from a smaller protein known as a peptide, as revealed by X-ray crystallography. The red spheres show chemical “cycles” formed by the enzyme that are required for antibacterial activity.
Scientists at Rutgers and universities in Russia, Poland and England have solved a nearly 30-year mystery – how the molecular machinery works in an enzyme that makes a potent antibiotic.
The latest game changer in diabetes research might not be a new drug or a therapy. Instead, it could be a system of human blood vessels virtually identical to the ones currently transporting blood throughout your body.
What makes these blood vessels special is that they are the first ones grown in a lab — and they’ve already generated a new lead in diabetes treatment.
A side effect of donating blood is the self-satisfaction in knowing that you’ve done your duty to help save a life. The whole process only takes about 15 minutes and you’re rewarded with a juice box and free cookies. While giving blood is super important—and always will be—if you really want to go the extra mile, you should consider donating your poop for use in fecal transplants, too.
According to a new report published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, “super-donors” are those whose microbiomes are swarming with good bacteria—ideal candidates to provide material for fecal transplants. With the help of these super poopers, doctors are working to eradicate irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, type 2 diabetes, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, and certain cancers.
Facial recognition can help unlock your phone. Could it also be able to play a far more valuable role in people’s lives by identifying whether or not a person has a rare genetic disorder, based exclusively on their facial features? DeepGestalt, an artificial intelligence built by the Boston-based tech company FDNA, suggests that the answer is a resounding “yes.”
The algorithm is already being used by leading geneticists at more than 2,000 sites in upward of 130 countries around the world. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers show how the algorithm was able to outperform clinicians when it came to identifying diseases.
The study involved 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. Its best performance came in distinguishing between different subtypes of a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, one of whose symptoms includes mildly unusual facial features. The A.I. was able to make the correct distinction 64 percent of the time. That is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than human clinicians, who identified Noonan syndrome correctly in just 20 percent of cases.
A new study showed that 3D-printing a spinal cord implant, shown here, restored movement in injured rats.UCSD JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
FOR DOCTORS AND medical researchers repairing the human body, a 3D printer has become almost as valuable as an x-ray machine, microscope, or a sharp scalpel. Bioengineers are using 3D printers to make more durable hip and knee joints, prosthetic limbs and, recently, to produce living tissue attached to a scaffold of printed material.
Researchers say that bio-printed tissue can be used to test the effects of drug treatments, for example, with an eventual goal of printing entire organs that can be grown and then transplanted into a patient. The latest step toward 3D-printed replacements of failed human parts comes from a team at UC San Diego. It has bio-printed a section of spinal cord that can be custom-fit into a patient’s injury.
From modeling to printing, it’s all about seeing inside someone’s head.
Face transplants are an ideal setting to fuse medicine with the growing world of 3D printing and imaging. The left image is a rendering of what face transplant recipient Cameron Underwood’s face looked like before his surgery; the right is a planned rendering based on the donor’s face.
Cameron Underwood received a new face on January 6, 2018. By the time his surgery ended, everything below Underwood’s eye sockets had been replaced with the face of organ donor William Fisher.
A face transplant is exactly what it sounds like—replacing the disfigured face of one person with the whole, undamaged face of a very recently deceased person. Eduardo Rodriguez, plastic surgeon and face transplant specialist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York who performed surgery on Underwood, insists this surgery is a way to give these patients “a second chance at life.” Without a new face, patients like Underwood have great difficulty speaking, swallowing, eating, expressing themselves, as well as all the other things we do with our faces that we never think twice about.
A physician in France performed the first successful face transplant surgery in 2005. Since then, only 40 other such surgeries have been done around the world. Rodriguez has performed three of those surgeries, including Underwood’s.
Researchers have been able to coax human breast cancer cells to turn into fat cells in a new proof-of-concept study in mice.
To achieve this feat, the team exploited a weird pathway that metastasising cancer cells have; their results are just a first step, but it’s a truly promising approach.
When you cut your finger, or when a foetus grows organs, the epithelium cells begin to look less like themselves, and more ‘fluid’ – changing into a type of stem cell called a mesenchyme and then reforming into whatever cells the body needs.
This process is called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and it’s been known for a while that cancer can use both this one and the opposite pathway called MET (mesenchymal‐to‐epithelial transition), to spread throughout the body and metastasise.
Apparently, the newest scientific discovery can possibly leave dentures and implants in the past, and make millions of people extremely happy.
These two methods for a missing tooth or teeth can lead to serious dental health issues, such as discomfort and irritations, difficulties to eat, and pain in the case of dentures, while implants can cause infections, nerve damage, injury or damage to the surrounding structures, and sinus problems.
Good news for people with type 1 diabetes. In case you missed it, the first “artificial pancreas” was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is now ready for prime time.
Innovative medical technology company Medtronic’s MiniMed 670G is the first device to combine an automated glucose monitor and an insulin pump. It administers an accurate amount of insulin as needed and will also automatically shut off insulin release when a drop in sugar levels is detected. This minimizes the risks of taking too much or too little insulin, both of which can have fatal consequences.
Medtronic describes the MiniMed 670G as “the first hybrid closed loop system in the world.” The device only requires patients to input mealtime carbohydrates and calibrate the sensors periodically, allowing them to live life more freely. It also helps them sleep well through the night and wake up with healthy glucose levels.
3D printing made some big advances in the medical domain last year, and it seems like that trend isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Proving that point is an impressive procedure recently carried out in Bulgaria, in which a patient received one of the first 3D-printed ribs as part of a potentially lifesaving operation. It demonstrated a new approach to create rib implants, using a process called fused deposition modeling (FDM), which is cheaper in both machine and material costs than other similar attempts.
“[The] patient, Ivaylo Josifov, was diagnosed with a rib deformation,” Mateusz Sidorowicz, director of marketing at 3DGence, the company which made the 3D printer, told Digital Trends. “The doctors were concerned that the deformity may progress, and decided to replace the rib with an implant. Unfortunately, traditional implants — made from titanium, for example — are very expensive. Also, the titanium itself is not a perfect material for replacing ribs.”
