My career as an international blood smuggler

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For years, Kathleen McLaughlin smuggled American plasma every time she entered China, home to the world’s largest and deadliest blood debacle. She had no other choice.

I started my decade-long turn as an international blood smuggler in 2004 with a mundane task: packing. I gently stacked a dozen half-liter glass vials into two soft-sided picnic coolers. The bottles held the components of a syrupy mix, a powerful medicine made from the immune system particles collected from thousands of people. A nurse would infuse the syrup into my veins, a treatment to keep my immune system under control, to halt its potentially paralyzing attacks on my nerves.

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The ‘blood boy’ clinic is coming to NYC so rich people can live forever

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The way Dr. Jesse Karmazin sees it, New York City needs some fresh blood.

It’s been over a year since we last heard from the physician behind Ambrosia LLC, the company hoping to reverse aging by pumping adults with the blood plasma of the young, but don’t think for a second that Karmazin’s been sitting still. Far from it.

Karmazin confirmed today over email that he plans to transform what was once a clinical trial running out of Monterey, California, into a full-fledged New York City-based clinic offering that most elusive of products: youth.

And you’d better believe it will cost you.

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Can old age be reversed by infusing blood from the young?

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August 2008, Tony Wyss-Coray waited for his lab’s weekly meeting to begin at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, California. Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, was leading a young group of researchers who studied ageing and neurodegeneration. As a rule, the gatherings were forgettable affairs – the incremental nature of scientific progress does not lend itself to big surprises. But a lab member scheduled to speak that day had taken on a radical project, and he had new results to share.

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rHEALTH diagnoses hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood

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rHealth Device

This month, the XPRIZE Foundation announced the winner of the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE. The global competition was aimed at accelerating the availability of hardware sensors and software sensing technology as a means to smarter digital health solutions. The winning device is called the Reusable Handheld Electrolyte and Lab Technology for Humans (rHEALTH) system. It can potentially run hundreds or even thousands of lab tests using a single drop of blood, and those tests, in turn, can be used to diagnose a range of diseases. (Video)

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We harvest the blood of half a million horseshoe crabs a year for medical science

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Harvesting the blood of horseshoe crabs.

The marvelous thing about horseshoe crab blood besides the baby blue color, is a chemical found only in the amoebocytes of its blood cells that can detect mere traces of bacterial presence and trap them in inescapable clots.

 

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Researchers develop artificial spleen that cleans up blood infections

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The ‘biospleen’ uses protein-equipped nanobeads and a magnet to cleanse blood of pathogens.

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a high-tech method to rid the body of infections — even those caused by unknown pathogens. A device inspired by the spleen can quickly clean blood of everything from Escherichia coli to Ebola, researchers report on 14 September in Nature Medicine.

 

 

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Researchers develop laser device that may end pin pricks for diabetics

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New laser device allows researchers to read blood sugar levels without a blood sample.

Researchers at Princeton University have developed a way to use a laser to measure people’s blood sugar, and, with more work to shrink the laser system to a portable size, the technique could allow diabetics to check their condition without pricking their fingers to draw blood.

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Scientists develop new blood test that could detect any type of cancer

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The simple test can diagnose cancer and pre-cancerous conditions from the blood of patients.

British scientists have developed a revolutionary new blood test that could detect any type of cancer. It is hoped the breakthrough will enable doctors to rule out cancer in patients presenting with certain symptoms – saving time and preventing costly and unnecessary invasive procedures and biopsies.

 

 

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Artificial blood for humans ‘will be manufactured in factories’

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Wellcome Trust-funded stem cell research has produced red blood cells fit for transfusion into humans.

The production of blood on an industrial scale could become a reality once a trial is conducted in which artificial blood made from human stem cells is tested in patients for the first time. It is the latest breakthrough in scientists’ efforts to re-engineer the body, which have already resulted in the likes of 3d-printed bones and bionic limbs.

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