You’ve maybe never heard of Bacillus Calmette–Guérin—it sounds kinda French after all, so why would you? But scratch a little deeper and you’ll find that BCG, as it’s commonly known, is one of the most overlooked wonder-drugs of our time.
Posts tagged "medical"
-
The Miracle Cure That's Hiding in Plain Sight →
-
Researchers crack retinal code to deliver artificial vision →
Cornell University researchers have devised a new method for restoring human vision by looking into the way retinal cells communicate with the brain and each other. The result, they claim, is an enormous leap in quality over existing visual prosthetics.
-
3D-Printed “Magic Arms”
-
Stem-cell pioneer banks on future therapies →
Progress toward stem-cell therapies has been frustratingly slow, delayed by research challenges, ethical and legal barriers and corporate jitters. Now, stem-cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan plans to jump-start the field by building up a bank of stem cells for therapeutic use. The bank would store dozens of lines of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, putting Japan in an unfamiliar position: at the forefront of efforts to introduce a pioneering biomedical technology.
-
Queen's University Belfast makes significant cancer breakthrough →
A major breakthrough by scientists at Queen’s University Belfast could lead to more effective treatments for throat and cervical cancer. The discovery could see the development of new therapies, which would target the non-cancerous cells surrounding a tumour, as well as treating the tumour itself.
Researchers at Queen’s Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology have found that the non-cancerous tissue, or ‘stroma’, surrounding cancers of the throat and cervix, plays an important role in regulating the spread of cancer cells.
The discovery opens the door for the development of new treatments which, by targeting this non-cancerous tissue, could prevent it being invaded by neighbouring cancer cells.
-
Digital pills make their way to market →
Digestible microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking their medications as prescribed. These sensors are the first ingestible devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To some, they signify the beginning of an era in digital medicine.
-
Scientists Engineer "Chimera" Primates to Combat Human Ailments →
Roku, Hex and Chimero are the world’s first primate chimeras—individual monkeys made from multiple fertilized eggs of the same species. Each animal has six different sets of genes instead of one. To produce each monkey, biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his team at the Oregon Health and Science University placed six separate four-celled embryos into a petri dish and, using a micropipette, nudged them into a single aggregation. After a few days, the researchers implanted the aggregation into an adult female macaque. The resulting young have cells descended from each of six embryos evenly distributed throughout their bodies.
-
Scientists pinpoint genetic changes that spell cancer →
By studying fruit flies, scientists at A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) have successfully devised a fast and cost-saving way to uncover genetic changes that have a higher potential to cause cancer. With this new approach, researchers will now be able to rapidly distinguish the range of genetic changes that are causally linked to cancer (i.e. “driver” mutations) versus those with limited impact on cancer progression. This research paves the way for doctors to design more targeted treatment against the different cancer types, based on the specific cancer-linked mutations present in the patient.
-
iRobot and InTouch Health Announce RP-VITA Telemedicine Robot →
-1343121243395.jpg)
Ever since iRobot announced its Healthcare Robotics division in 2009, we’ve been speculating about what the company would come up with. Our first guess was a telepresence platform (based on the ConnectR), but when we met Ava in January of 2011, that healthcare-telepresence idea got super-sized. A year ago this week, iRobot partnered with InTouch Health to “revolutionize how people communicate and deliver information through remote presence,” and now it’s looking like our prediction was pretty darn close, as iRobot and InTouch are today officially unveiling the RP-VITA, an Ava-based telemedicine platform for hospitals. We spoke with InTouch chairman and CEO Yulun Wang along with iRobot senior VP Glen Weinstein to get you all the details.
-
Three-in-one drug wipes the floor with TB →
After decades rampaging across the globe, tuberculosis has a real fight on its hands. That’s thanks to the arrival of a drug combination that could for the first time dramatically shorten treatment and tackle both ordinary and multi-drug-resistant strains of TB.
-
Breast cancer's stealth mechanism revealed →
Australian researchers have discovered a mechanism that allows some breast cancer cells avoid the immune system and form secondary cancers in other parts of the body.
-
How Man-Made Jellyfish Could Help Heart Patients →
A half-inch-long juvenile jellyfish pulses and swims much like any of its compatriots in oceans all over the world. The major difference? It’s entirely man-made. “It’s a biohybrid robot. It’s part animal, it’s part synthetic material,” said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University who led the jellyfish-building effort.
-
Nanoparticle Completely Eradicates Hepatitis C Virus →
Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have developed a nanoparticle that has shown 100 percent effectiveness in eradicating the hepatitis C virus in laboratory testing.
The nanoparticle, dubbed a nanozyme, consists of a backbone made from gold nanoparticles and a surface with two biological components. One biological component is an enzyme that attacks and destroys the mRNA, which provides the recipe for duplicating the protein that causes the disease. The other biological part is the navigator, if you will. It is a DNA oligonucleotide that identifies the disease-related protein and sends the enzyme on course to destroy it.
-
The laser-powered bionic eye that gives 576-pixel grayscale vision to the blind →
After a lot of theorizing, postulating, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the US. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases.
-
Is Future-Use DNA Sampling Ethical? →
My mother-in-law’s arms look like she’s been in a fight. The bruises don’t hurt, but they’re embarrassing. They’re likely due to the drug Plavix, a trade-off for preventing clots. But we don’t know if the drug is actually helping, because she started it before the FDA urged physicians to use a pharmacogenetic (PGx) test to distinguish patients likely to respond to the drug from “poor metabolizers,” who won’t. And no one’s thought to test her since.
