Category: Medical Tech

By loading magnetic nanoparticles with drugs and dressing them in biochemical camouflage, Houston Methodist researchers say they can destroy blood clots 100 to 1,000 times faster than a commonly used clot-busting technique.   The finding, reported in Advanced Functional Materials (early online), is based on experiments in human blood and mouse clotting models. If the drug delivery system performs similarly well in planned human clinical trials, it could mean a major step forward in the prevention of strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms, and other dire circumstances where clots — if…

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At Stanford University a new fabric has been developed that lets body heat escape unlike any other. While there are a lot of materials on the market that were designed to pass sweat through to quickly evaporate on the surface, Stanford’s flexible plastic textile also lets infrared energy escape as well. Typical clothing traps heat, which, besides showing off, is a big reason a lot of people wear very little while exercising. The researchers claim if made into clothing, the fabric would make a person feel about four degrees cooler…

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Scientists at the University of Adelaide and ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics have developed a tiny probe for measuring the temperature inside the brain. As anyone with an extremely high fever will attest to, the brain doesn’t respond well to high heat. Various diseases, drugs, and concussions can create swelling, inflammation, and other temperature changes, and studying how treatment affects these can be helped with an accurate brain thermometer. The researchers used their probe to measure the temperature within small regions of a moving rat’s brain because of its size of less…

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Nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular scale to create materials with remarkably varied and new properties, is a rapidly expanding area of research with huge potential in many sectors, ranging from healthcare to construction and electronics. In medicine, it promises to revolutionize drug delivery, gene therapy, diagnostics, and many areas of research, development and clinical application. This article does not attempt to cover the whole field, but offers, by means of some examples, a few insights into how nanotechnology has the potential to change medicine, both…

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Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a point-of-care device for detecting the Zika virus for under $2 a pop. It’s about the size of a can of coke and can be operated by just about anyone, and even outside the clinic. A patient simply spits into the receptacle and after a while a paper test strip changes its color to a shade of blue if a Zika virus is detected. Previously available tests either take a lot of time, produce too many false negatives, or require expensive equipment…

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At the post-grad research collaboration called Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), a team has developed a microfluidic device for testing how electric fields influence living cells. The main goal for the technology is to identify the nature of the electric fields that best disrupt the activity of cancer cells, the growth and multiplication of which has been shown in the past to be influenced by external electric fields. Potentially, there’s a chance that electrodes could be used in the future to simply stop and even kill cancer cells completely from outside the…

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Medtronic won EU approval to introduce its Guardian Connect continuous glucose monitoring system for diabetics taking injected insulin. The wearable stick-on glucometer wirelessly connects to the Guardian Connect app via a Bluetooth, updating the iPhone with the latest readings on a regular basis. It takes readings every five minutes, which equates with 288 samplings every day. Sugar levels that fall outside preset boundaries raise an alarm through the phone app, and it can also send SMS messages to loved ones and caretakers when that happens as well. The app can upload a complete…

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Scientists have created a type of nanoparticle that they say can effectively deliver vaccines to the lungs, protecting against numerous infectious diseases. This is according to a study published in Science Translational Medicine. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say the nanoparticle vaccine could help protect againstinfluenza and other respiratory diseases, as well as prevent sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV, human papilloma virus and herpes simplex virus. The scientists note that many viruses and bacteria infect humans through mucosal surfaces, such as those in the lungs. Therefore, they wanted to develop vaccines that are…

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Ultrasound imaging is used around the world to help visualize developing babies and diagnose diseases. Sound waves bounce off the tissues, revealing their different densities and shapes. The next step in ultrasound technology is to image not just anatomy, but specific cells and molecules deeper in the body, such as those associated with tumors or bacteria in our gut.   A new study from Caltech outlines how protein engineering techniques might help achieve this milestone. The researchers engineered protein-shelled nanostructures called gas vesicles — which reflect sound waves — to…

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