Recently in Medical Technology Category

From The Jerusalem Post:

Pfizer CEO's Israel visit canceled because he is not fully vaccinated
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has canceled his expected visit to Israel after it turned out he has not been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, N12 reported Friday.

His excuse:

Bourla said in December that he has not yet received the vaccine yet because he does not want to "cut in line," and would wait until his age group is next in line for getting vaccinated. As such, he has received the first dose, but not the second one yet. 

Yeah - his company makes the stuff.

I had posted about Pager playing pong three months ago.
From the University of California - San Francisco:

“Neuroprosthesis” Restores Words to Man with Paralysis
Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen.

The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a clinical research trial, builds on more than a decade of effort by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, to develop a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate even if they are unable to speak on their own. The study appears July 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak,” said Chang, the Joan and Sanford Weill Chair of Neurological Surgery at UCSF, Jeanne Robertson Distinguished Professor, and senior author on the study. “It shows strong promise to restore communication by tapping into the brain's natural speech machinery.”

These are baby steps but still, amazing work.  There are several technologies that had to come together to do something like this - a confluence.  Fun time to be alive.

Time to start wearing my AFDB on a regular basis.

Heh - not surprised on bit - from Breitbart:

World Health Organization Hires PR Firm to Find Celebrity Influencers to Counter Negative Publicity
Under fire from President Trump for its botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization has reached out to a high powered PR firm with the mission to find celebrity influencers who can sing the praises of the embattled United Nations agency and boost its public image.

The WHO signed a $135,000 contract on May 1 with Hill + Knowlton Strategies to reach out to influencers of all stripes, including celebrities with more than 1 million followers on social media, according to documents filed this week to the Justice Department.

Hill + Knowlton outlined a plan of action in its proposal that was included in the filing.

“There has been criticism and assertions leveled against the World Health Organization (WHO) and media coverage that could undermine WHO as a trusted and critical information source on global public health issues,” the PR firm wrote. The objective is to “ensure there is trust in the WHO’s advice and that public health guidance is followed.”

Of course they would hire social media "influencers". They stopped doing science and medicine 60 years ago (hint: they were founded 72 years ago). They are a political organization that sells out to the highest bidder and hews to the progressive narrative. They have nothing to do with Health or Medicine or Science.

The whole of the United Nations are about as useful as tits on a boar hog and they should be defunded and their prime real-estate in Manhattan should be reclaimed. They could put up a palatial headquarters in Mogadishu or somewhere appropriate. They could probably get a decent price on one of Saddam Hussain's palaces. (here, here, or here) I still think that a Trump Tower would be a perfect replacement for the Manhattan HQ. Poke them in the eye a little bit 🙂

From Science Daily:

'Poisoned arrow' defeats antibiotic-resistant bacteria
A team of Princeton researchers reported today in the journal Cell that they have found a compound, SCH-79797, that can simultaneously puncture bacterial walls and destroy folate within their cells -- while being immune to antibiotic resistance.

Bacterial infections come in two flavors -- Gram-positive and Gram-negative -- named for the scientist who discovered how to distinguish them. The key difference is that Gram-negative bacteria are armored with an outer layer that shrugs off most antibiotics. In fact, no new classes of Gram-negative-killing drugs have come to market in nearly 30 years.

"This is the first antibiotic that can target Gram-positives and Gram-negatives without resistance," said Zemer Gitai, Princeton's Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology and the senior author on the paper. "From a 'Why it's useful' perspective, that's the crux. But what we're most excited about as scientists is something we've discovered about how this antibiotic works -- attacking via two different mechanisms within one molecule -- that we are hoping is generalizable, leading to better antibiotics -- and new types of antibiotics -- in the future."

The greatest weakness of antibiotics is that bacteria evolve quickly to resist them, but the Princeton team found that even with extraordinary effort, they were unable to generate any resistance to this compound. "This is really promising, which is why we call the compound's derivatives 'Irresistin,'" Gitai said.

This is big. Nobel Prize big if it pans out. Holy Grail. Once they figure out the mechanism, they will be able to develop a class of these drugs tailored to specific bugs.

Three news items all related. From San Francisco station KRON:

Medical tech company claims to have cure for HIV
American Gene Technologies believes it may have a potential cure for HIV-AIDS.

The Rockville, Maryland pharmaceutical company filed a 1,000-page application to the FDA on Wednesday.

Next, the website from the company in question: American Gene Technologies

Redesigning Medicine
AGT uses a proprietary gene delivery platform to rapidly develop patented gene and cell therapies that cure infectious disease, monogenic disorders, and cancers by targeting their genetic root causes.

A bit more:

Gene Therapies
AGT’s platform allows it to pursue exciting clinical “cures” in large and orphan indications and complex diseases. The company has developed individual, intellectual property protected gene therapeutics that are breakthroughs in medicine.

They are not saying very much on their website but in addition to HIV, they are working on a Liver Cancer cure as well as a cure for Phenylketonuria

FInally, this from the Baltimore, Md. CBS affilliate:

Maryland Medical Company Claims To Have Cure For HIV, AIDS
A Maryland medical company has submitted an application to the U.S Food and Drug Administration for a gene therapy it says will eliminate HIV.

American Gene Technologies in Rockville said based on lab tests, the single-dose gene therapy has a “high potential” to be effective.

The company said the therapy, AGT103-T, is a genetically-modified product made from a person’s own cells that focuses on repairing damage to the immune system caused by HIV.

“Our aim is to treat HIV disease with an innovative cell and gene therapy that reconstitutes immunity to HIV and will control virus growth in the absence of antiretroviral drugs,” the company’s chief science officer C. David Pauza said.

A shoe-in for a Nobel if it turns out to work. I wish them luck!

That is worthy of a Nobel Prize if this works for humans - from Stanford University:

In human cells and mice, a cure for the common cold, Stanford-UCSF study reports
Temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells might be able to protect us from the common cold and other viral diseases, according to a study led by researchers at Stanford University and University of California-San Francisco.

The findings were made in human cell cultures and in mice.

“Our grandmas have always been asking us, ‘If you’re so smart, why haven’t you come up with a cure for the common cold?’”said Jan Carette, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology. “Now we have a new way to do that.”

The approach of targeting proteins in our own cells also worked to stop viruses associated with asthma, encephalitis and polio.

Fun time to be alive...

From nature - microbiology:

An enzymatic pathway in the human gut microbiome that converts A to universal O type blood
Access to efficient enzymes that can convert A and B type red blood cells to ‘universal’ donor O would greatly increase the supply of blood for transfusions. Here we report the functional metagenomic screening of the human gut microbiome for enzymes that can remove the cognate A and B type sugar antigens. Among the genes encoded in our library of 19,500 expressed fosmids bearing gut bacterial DNA, we identify an enzyme pair from the obligate anaerobe Flavonifractor plautii that work in concert to efficiently convert the A antigen to the H antigen of O type blood, via a galactosamine intermediate. The X-ray structure of the N-acetylgalactosamine deacetylase reveals the active site and mechanism of the founding member of an esterase family. The galactosaminidase expands activities within the CAZy family GH36. Their ability to completely convert A to O of the same rhesus type at very low enzyme concentrations in whole blood will simplify their incorporation into blood transfusion practice, broadening blood supply.

Faster please...

From Science Daily:

New compound which kills antibiotic-resistant superbugs discovered
A new compound which visualises and kills antibiotic resistant superbugs has been discovered by scientists at the University of Sheffield and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

The team, led by Professor Jim Thomas, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Chemistry, is testing new compounds developed by his PhD student Kirsty Smitten on antibiotic resistant gram-negative bacteria, including pathogenic E. coli.

A bit on why this is important:

Antimicrobial resistance is already responsible for 25,000 deaths in the EU each year, and unless this rapidly emerging threat is addressed, it's estimated by 2050 more than 10 million people could die every year due to antibiotic resistant infections.

Doctors have not had a new treatment for gram-negative bacteria in the last 50 years, and no potential drugs have entered clinical trials since 2010.

No more news - it will be interesting if it works in humans.

Nobel Prizes all around if this turns out to be real - from The Jerusalem Post:

A CURE FOR CANCER? ISRAELI SCIENTISTS SAY THEY THINK THEY FOUND ONE
A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.

“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.

“Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,” Aridor said. “Our solution will be both generic and personal.”

A lot more at the site - sounds legit. Even if it does not cure all kinds of cancer, this will be a game changer.

From Science Alert:

This Incredible Virus Attacks Brain Cancer And Actually Boosts Our Immune System
A study attempting to show that viruses could be delivered to brain tumours has delivered that and more.

Not only did the virus in question reach its target, it also stimulated the patient's own immune system - which then also attacked the tumour.

Preclinical experiments in mice, followed by window-of-opportunity trials in nine human patients, showed that the naturally occurring virus offers potential for a new type of cancer therapy that could be used alongside other treatments.

The virus they used is one that has previously shown potential for cancer treatment - what is known as an oncolytic virus.

It's called mammalian orthoreovirus type 3, from the reovirus family, and it has previously been shown to kill tumour cells, but leave healthy cells alone.

Previous experiments have demonstrated this mechanism, but researchers from the University of Leeds are the first to successfully direct it at brain tumours.

Interesting development.

Interesting news from Science Alert:

Gene Therapy Has Been Used to 'Switch Off' Asthma Symptoms
Scientists have used gene therapy to 'switch off' the immune response that causes asthma, and are hopeful that the same technique could be used to target other severe allergies to peanuts, bee venom, and shellfish, keeping them at bay for life.

The research, which has so far seen success in animal trials, works by erasing the memory of the cells responsible for causing an allergic reaction, and if replicated in humans, could offer a one-off treatment for allergy patients.

"The challenge in asthma and allergies is that these immune cells, known as T-cells, develop a form of immune 'memory', and become very resistant to treatments," says lead researcher Ray Steptoe from the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia.

"We have now been able 'wipe' the memory of these T-cells in animals with gene therapy, de-sensitising the immune system so that it tolerates the [allergen] protein."

This is wonderful news. My ex has asthma and the inhalers are powerful drugs that impact the entire body. To be able to take care of peanut and shellfish allergies as well would save a lot of lives.

Why the fsck would a dishwasher need to be connected to the internet? From Motherboard:

A Hackable Dishwasher Is Connecting Hospitals to the Internet of Shit
If it's connected to the internet, it can be hacked. In an age where manufacturers are rushing to put any kind of device onto the internet, we're quickly finding out that how adage holds true. Crock-pots, light bulbs, thermostats, GPS trackers for kids, billboards, and even teddy bears have all been hacked recently.

Alas, that's not stopping anyone from connecting stuff to the internet. The German domestic-appliance giant Miele decided to make a dishwasher that can be connected to the internet and, of course, someone found out it has a bug that allows hackers to break into it, infect it with malware, and give them the opportunity to use it as leverage to hack other devices on the network.

The worst part of all this is that this ain't your average dishwasher. This is a "washer-disinfector" that's mostly used in hospitals or medical facilities and labs. So it can be a good target if your end goal is to steal private medical information or maybe hold the hospitals' computers for ransom.

Jens Regel, a security consultant, found a "web server directory traversal" bug in the Miele PG 8528 when he was prodding a network for vulnerabilities during a consulting gig, what's known in the industry as a penetration test or "pentest." That kind of vulnerability allows an unauthorized attacker to gain access to the file system of the server to which the machine connects to.

Unreal - and there is no patch forthcoming from Miele. Another example of this is the Pyxis Supplystation from Carefusion - from last March's article in BoingBoing:

Automated drug cabinets have 1400+ critical vulns that will never be patched
The Pyxis Supplystation from Carefusion is an automated pharmaceutical drug cabinet system that's still widely used despite being end-of-lifed by its manufacturer -- a new report from CERT discloses that independent researchers Billy Rios and Mike Ahmadi have found over 1,400 critical remote-attack vulnerabilities.

Many of the vulnerabilities need very little skill to exploit and the researchers say they believe they're already being exploited in the wild, with exploits being publicly available.

The cabinets are based on Microsoft's discontinued Windows XP/Server 2000 products. Carefusion will not issue patches for the old systems, but they have provided some advice to help customers mitigate the risk from these bugs (things like using VPNs, having a firewall, etc).

The ICS-CERT (different CERT than what I am doing out here) report is here: Advisory (ICSMA-16-089-01) CareFusion Pyxis SupplyStation System Vulnerabilities

Christ on a Corn Dog - how many people will be seriously injured with crap like this. I am reminded of the Therac-25 from the 1980's. Next time I am at the hospital visiting anyone, I'm bringing my laptop with nmap and some other goodies installed.

From the Bangor, Maine Bangor Daily News:

Scientists at MDI Biological Laboratory discover a tiny molecule that may be able to heal a damaged heart
MDI Biological Laboratory in Mount Desert Island, Maine has been awarded a patent on a tiny molecule called MSI-1436.

This is a big deal for two reasons:

1. 1. It’s a first for MDI.
   2. It paves the way for a possible drug that would repair and regenerate damaged heart tissue.

Tissue regeneration
Our bodies already have a remarkable ability to repair and regenerate damaged tissue. Think of how skin heals after a cut or surgery, how torn muscles repair themselves, how you could lose a huge portion of your liver and it would be able to regenerate itself, how broken bones knit.

Unfortunately, other tissues, such as the spinal cord, brain, and heart, do a poor job of regeneration. When a person has a heart attack, for instance, scar tissue forms in the damaged area and it can no longer function like it’s supposed to.

“Basically,” explained MDI President, Kevin Strange, Ph.D., “the current standard of treatment for a heart attack, assuming you survive it, is you in effect spend the rest of your life being treated with drugs and other sorts of approaches to try and prevent a secondary heart attack and to try and prevent heart failure. If you go into heart failure that’s kind of it unless you can get a transplant.”

Or … unless a drug was available that could activate your heart to repair itself. That’s the promise of MSI-1436. MDIBL scientist Voot P. Yin, Ph.D., said it was a eureka moment when he realized its potential.

They are planning to take it to market:

Testing that theory will take several years and likely millions of dollars. Getting the patent on the molecule is a major step toward doing clinical studies in humans. MDI, which is a non-profit lab, also moved ahead and created a for-profit spin-off called Novo Biosciences to develop MSI-1436 as a regenerative medicine therapy.

And it has already been through some human clinical trials:

“This drug has already made it through all of that early toxicity testing,” said Dr. Strange, “and it’s also been in what are called FDA Phase 1a and 1b clinical trials. It was initially being tested as an anti-obesity and type 2 diabetes drug and what they showed is that the drug was quite well tolerated by patients.”

Very cool - faster please!

IBM's Watson technology is being used in medicine. From Business Insider:

How IBM Watson saved the life of a woman dying from cancer, exec says

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has called health care IBM’s “moonshot.”
IBM has spent years training its super-smart, learning, reasonsing computer service Watson to do things like analyze massive amounts of data to help improve the patient diagnosis.

One such story:

“There’s a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran her genomic sequence through Watson and it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing. Actually, she had two strains of leukemia. The did treat her and she is healthy.”

He added, “That’s one example. Statistically, we’re seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis.”

Very cool technology - it is something that can be operated in the cloud - upload the data and get your results. No need to have the diagnostic computer at the hospital. This way, as more and more cases are presented, it can learn. Faster please!

From McGill University in Montreal, Quebec:

Legions of nanorobots target cancerous tumours with precision
Researchers from Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have just achieved a spectacular breakthrough in cancer research. They have developed new nanorobotic agents capable of navigating through the bloodstream to administer a drug with precision by specifically targeting the active cancerous cells of tumours. This way of injecting medication ensures the optimal targeting of a tumour and avoids jeopardizing the integrity of organs and surrounding healthy tissues. As a result, the drug dosage that is highly toxic for the human organism could be significantly reduced.

This scientific breakthrough has just been published in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology in an article titled “Magneto-aerotactic bacteria deliver drug-containing nanoliposomes to tumour hypoxic regions.” The article notes the results of the research done on mice, which were successfully administered nanorobotic agents into colorectal tumours.

“These legions of nanorobotic agents were actually composed of more than 100 million flagellated bacteria – and therefore self-propelled – and loaded with drugs that moved by taking the most direct path between the drug’s injection point and the area of the body to cure,” explains Professor Sylvain Martel, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Medical Nanorobotics and Director of the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory, who heads the research team’s work. “The drug’s propelling force was enough to travel efficiently and enter deep inside the tumours.”

Ho. Li. Crap. They are engineering motile bacteria, giving it a chemical payload and then using an external magnetic field to steer them through blood vessels and capillaries into the heart of the tumor. More at the site. This is not only amazing, it opens doors for other therapies. Nobel Prize anyone?

I had a hip replacement eight years ago and love it - the joint was bone on bone and I tried alternative healing but nothing worked. Acupuncture was great for pain management but the medicines did nothing to regrow the joint. Titanium is the metal of choice for replacement joints - it is bio-compatible and bone tissue will grow on it so after a month or two of healing, the joint is as strong as the original. Now this - from Rice University:

Titanium + gold = new gold standard for artificial joints
Titanium is the leading material for artificial knee and hip joints because it’s strong, wear-resistant and nontoxic, but an unexpected discovery by Rice University physicists shows that the gold standard for artificial joints can be improved with the addition of some actual gold.

“It is about 3-4 times harder than most steels,” said Emilia Morosan, the lead scientist on a new study in Science Advances that describes the properties of a 3-to-1 mixture of titanium and gold with a specific atomic structure that imparts hardness. “It’s four times harder than pure titanium, which is what’s currently being used in most dental implants and replacement joints.”

Morosan, a physicist who specializes in the design and synthesis of compounds with exotic electronic and magnetic properties, said the new study is “a first for me in a number of ways. This compound is not difficult to make, and it’s not a new material.”

In fact, the atomic structure of the material — its atoms are tightly packed in a “cubic” crystalline structure that’s often associated with hardness — was previously known. It’s not even clear that Morosan and former graduate student Eteri Svanidze, the study’s lead co-author, were the first to make a pure sample of the ultrahard “beta” form of the compound. But due to a couple of lucky breaks, they and their co-authors are the first to document the material’s remarkable properties.

The paper can be found at the AAAS Science Advances: High hardness in the biocompatible intermetallic compound β-Ti3Au

From England's Great Ormond Street Hospital:

World first use of gene-edited immune cells to treat ‘incurable’ leukaemia
A new treatment that uses ‘molecular scissors’ to edit genes and create designer immune cells programmed to hunt out and kill drug resistant leukaemia has been used at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).

The treatment, previously only tested in the laboratory, was used in one-year-old, Layla, who had relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). She is now cancer free and doing well.

This breakthrough comes from GOSH and UCL Institute of Child Health’s (ICH) pioneering research teams, who together are developing treatments and cures for some of the rarest childhood diseases.

Chemotherapy successfully treats many patients with leukaemia but it can be ineffective in patients with particularly aggressive forms of the disease where cancer cells can remain hidden or resistant to drug therapy. Recent developments have led to treatments where immune cells, known as T-cells, are gathered from patients and programmed using gene therapy to recognise and kill cancerous cells. Multiple clinical trials are underway, but individuals with leukaemia, or those who have had several rounds of chemotherapy, often don’t have enough healthy T-cells to collect and modify meaning this type of treatment is not appropriate.

A bit more about the nuts and bolts of the treatment:

The treatment works by adding new genes to healthy donor T-cells, which arm them against leukaemia. Using molecular tools (TALEN®) that act like very accurate scissors, specific genes are then cut in order to make the T-cells behave in two specific ways. Firstly, the cells became invisible to a powerful leukaemia drug that would usually kill them and secondly they are reprogrammed to only target and fight against leukaemia cells.

The team at GOSH and the UCL ICH, along with investigators at University College London and biotech company Cellectis, had been developing ‘off-the-shelf’ banks of these donor T-cells and the first of which was due to be used for final stage testing ahead of clinical trials. But, after hearing about this infant, the team received special permission to try the new treatment early.

Very clever two-pronged attack - the off-the-shelf banks of cells is wonderful too. They can culture them as needed.

There are a lot of different systems to integrate but it is an interesting start. From The Toronto Star:

New fully digital Humber River Hospital aims to be a model
It’s hard to be envious of anyone stuck in a hospital bed, but the new Humber River Hospital draws more comparisons to a swanky hotel than a gloomy facility reeking of antiseptic and teeming with nerves.

Step through the doors of the state-of-the-art hospital and you’ll find robots that mix drugs and transport goods, bedside touchscreens that allow patients to video-chat with doctors, and machines that process blood samples in minutes, automatically entering results into electronic records.

All of that catapults the facility, set to open Sunday at Keele St. and Highway 401, light years ahead of its former digs, which were desperate for an upgrade.

Definitely the way of the future - still, I would like to have it get a few years under their belt before I check in for anything. Never run Version 1.0 of anything...

From Bloomberg:

More. Faster. Hat tip to Peter for the link.

When this becomes available to Veterinarians, I'll buy some "for the farm animals" just to have in case.

From NBC News:

Nose Spray Ebola Vaccine Protects Monkeys
A needle-free Ebola vaccine protects monkeys 100 percent of the time from the virus, even a year after they’ve been vaccinated, researchers reported Monday.

The vaccine uses a common cold virus genetically engineered to carry a tiny piece of Ebola DNA. Sprayed up the nose, it saved all nine monkeys tested for infection.

But now the research is dead in the water without funding, Maria Croyle of the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Pharmacy said.

“Now we are at the crossroads, trying to figure out where to get the funding and resources to continue,” Croyle told NBC News.

It’s only a small study, but the results are encouraging, said Croyle, whose findings are published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics and being discussed at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists meeting in San Diego this week.

It has been successful for one year and yet, they are scrambling for funding? Sample size is too small and there have been no human trials but still...

More. Faster. Please.

Anthony Watts runs the excellent award-winning climate website Watts Up With That

Over the years, he alluded to some hearing problems but never dwelled on it. Today, he posted a wonderful story about how he has now regained almost all of his hearing. Something to forward to anyone you know with hearing problems. A great read.

From Anthony:

How I got my life back – my hearing has been restored to near-normal
This is an extremely personal note, and I have been waiting a week to write to see if in fact the results were real and lasting. I’m happy to report that they are and I am a changed person as a result of this transformation. Let me tell you a story about my struggle and how I suffered with for years now my family and my friends in my career and everything suffered along with it and what I did to solve it.

Many of you that read WUWT and have met me in person at conferences, speaking engagements, and over the telephone realize what a struggle everyday life has been for me with an 85% hearing loss. The story begins when I was an infant – I had a series of infections which our local doctor treated with tetracycline, an antibiotic that at the time they did not know would cause long-term hearing loss. It also causes discoloring of your adult teeth in later life. Like with so many drugs, no one quite knew at the time what long-term effects it might have. The product is now [mostly] off the market, however the effect remained with me and many other people.

Anthony finds a clinic that deals with his problem:

This section of the campus at the Starkey Laboratories is called the Center for Excellence and indeed it is, because this is where miracles are performed every day by a staff of caring and talented people that exist nowhere else in the world.

The walls are lined with photographs, autographs, and letters from heads of state, celebrities, astronauts, the Pope, and even a letter from Mother Teresa thanking the man that formed this company and the miracle that it produces for restoring their hearing.

And the results are excellent in even the worst conditions (lots of ambient noise and other people talking):

This was a moment I’ll remember forever. All of a sudden the tables were turned, and I was thrilled beyond imagination to be able to repeat something for someone else. I knew then that a transformation that occurred and I made it short and simple post to my Facebook page. It read:

And to my amazement dozens and then hundreds of accolades and comment started pouring in while I was sitting there at the bar. I began to cry and tears were streaming down my face. I was so happy and I couldn’t stop it because the weight and pain of the last 40 years were suddenly lifted from me. It truly was epic.

There were two people sitting at the end corner of the bar who looked at me and asked with concern, “Sir, are you okay?”  I proceeded to tell them what happened and I had a glorious conversation with two people who I had never met and I understood every word. They were thrilled for me.

I can’t begin to tell you what that felt like. And it kept getting better as I learned to be able to tune these new hearing aids to situations and it made comprehension even easier. The next day I posted this on my Facebook page:

I had feared that maybe this was just the temporary gain, but now nearly a week later my comprehension gains continue, and I am healed in more ways than one.

You see, the inability to hear on a daily basis during normal simple everyday things like ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks or going through a drive through the order food to take on the my family were challenges that I often failed and it made me frustrated and angry all the time. This affected people around me and especially the people I hold most dear; my own family. Now all of that is gone and I’m like an entirely new person because of this transformation.

My ability to hear and the telephone has been transformed too. These new hearing aids have direct Bluetooth connections and so I am able to carry on a conversation using both ears with my cell phone. The fidelity is phenomenal and my comprehension is now nearly perfect where maybe before I could pick up 50% on a good day. This new technology is beyond what I could have imagined.

The place that Anthony went to is the Starkey Hearing Foundation - amazing people, amazing work.

This is huge - from the Beeb:

Whole organ 'grown' in world first
A whole functional organ has been grown from scratch inside an animal for the first time, say researchers in Scotland.

A group of cells developed into a thymus - a critical part of the immune system - when transplanted into mice.

The findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, could pave the way to alternatives to organ transplantation.

Experts said the research was promising, but still years away from human therapies.

Say bye-bye to immune response and tissue rejection problems. This is a long long way from being able to grow a new heart or liver or kidneys but still, a step in the right direction.

I had cataract surgery five years ago - a mis-spent youth hiking ice fields and sailing without wearing protective eyeglasses caused the damage.

I now have two lenses made from plastic where my original equipment used to be.  The surgery is quick and painless and I was using the eye the next day (vision was blurry but usable). The downside is that the range of focusing was reduced.  The option was for great distance vision and needing reading glasses or great closeup vision and needing corrective lenses for distance. Considering that I can get a great pair of 2X readers at WalMart for about $10, I chose the first option. Generic distance glasses are not a commercial product.

Ran into this story today at Fox News:

Researchers regrow corneas using adult human stem cells
Boston researchers have successfully regrown human corneal tissue – a feat that could potentially restore vision in the blind.

The achievement also marks one of the first times that scientists have constructed tissue using adult-derived human stem cells.

The article goes into a lot of detail - fascinating reading.

More! Faster!

From MedGaget:

Custom 3D Printed Kidneys Help Surgeons Remove Tumors

Removing a tumor from an organ can be a challenge when it's located in a hard to reach spot surrounded by fragile tissue, such as in the retroperitoneal space. Surgeons typically review CT scans prior to the operation, planning what approach they'll take in their minds. Now researchers at Kobe University in Japan are offering surgeons 3D-printed recreations of their patients' own kidneys, including the tumor and surrounding vasculature, to analyze and practice on.

The team uses pre-op CT scans to create 3D models of the kidneys, which are then transferred to the printer. The kidney is then printed out of two different materials so that the tumor and vasculature stand out from the rest of the organ. This allows the surgeons to initially see the tumor and vessels that will be much harder to spot during actual surgery.

What a wonderful idea -- you can 3D print with a huge range of materials so picking something that looks right and has the right consistency is a no-brainer.

South Korean Plastic Surgeons Are Too Good At Their Job

People who get plastic surgery claim they do it to better themselves, making themselves look and feel better, but plastic surgery can also complicate your life and make it hard to re-enter your home country when your new face doesn't match the one in your passport photo.

Women heading from China and Japan to South Korea in order to undergo extensive plastic surgery are finding the operations so successful that customs agents don't believe they're the same person.

It has become such a problem that some Korean hospitals are now issuing "plastic surgery certificates" to their patients so they can go home again.

Kidney grown in lab successfully transplanted into rat
Scientists have grown a kidney in a laboratory and shown that it works when implanted into a living animal. The work is an important step towards the longer-term goal of growing personalised replacement organs that could be transplanted into people with kidney failure.

In the latest work, Harald Ott of Massachusetts General hospital led a team of scientists who grew a kidney by using an experimental technique that has previously been used to create working hearts, lungs and livers.

Ott first took a rat kidney and stripped out its functional cells using a solution of detergent. That left behind a white cellular matrix, the collagen scaffold that gives the organ its three-dimensional structure.

His team then introduced kidney and blood vessel cells from newborn rats onto the scaffold and cultured the growing organ for 12 days, until the cells had grown to cover the scaffold. The team then implanted the organ into a living rat, where it successfully filtered the animal's blood and produced urine. The work is published on Sunday in Nature Medicine.

It builds on methods pioneered by the American bioengineer Doris Taylor, who first used it in 2008 to grow whole, beating hearts. She described the collagen structure left behind after the bleach had done its work as being like the "gristle" in a steak.

Wonderful long article at the New Yorker regarding some changes being made at Hospitals. Changes that are very similar to kitchen operations at the Cheesecake Factory.

From Atul Gawande writing at The New Yorker:

Big Med
It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the "Skinnylicious" menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It's a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There's wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there's also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food - pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.

The place is huge, but it's invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entre is under fifteen dollars. The decor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food - can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se? - it was delicious.

The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. And yet nothing smacked of mass production. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).

I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everything's pretty much made from scratch - except the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California.

I'd come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven't figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital.

It's easy to mock places like the Cheesecake Factory - restaurants that have brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals. But the casual dining sector, as it is known, plays a central role in the ecosystem of eating, providing three-course, fork-and-knife restaurant meals that most people across the country couldn't previously find or afford. The ideas start out in elite, upscale restaurants in major cities. You could think of them as research restaurants, akin to research hospitals. Some of their enthusiasms - miso salmon, Chianti-braised short ribs, flourless chocolate espresso cake - spread to other high-end restaurants. Then the casual-dining chains re-engineer them for affordable delivery to millions. Does health care need something like this?

And the answer? YES! Dr. Gawande (an Md.) goes on to describe several examples of the factory management techniques being implemented in some hospital chains and their results. Yes, every person is different but there is a lot that can be standardized. The documentation shows that the patient experience improved, the cost of medical care decreased and the recovery was faster. A fun read. Dr. Gawande closes with this observation:

The critical question is how soon that sort of quality and cost control will be available to patients everywhere across the country. We've let health-care systems provide us with the equivalent of greasy-spoon fare at four-star prices, and the results have been ruinous. The Cheesecake Factory model represents our best prospect for change. Some will see danger in this. Many will see hope. And that's probably the way it should be.

Kidney donation saga takes another grim turn for NYC man who lost sister during surgery
Two weeks ago, Roberto Medina�s sister died while undergoing surgery to give him one of her kidneys. Now, the ailing New York City man is leaving the hospital feeling traumatized � again.

Medina told reporters he was summoned to Montefiore Medical Center on Wednesday and told that a new kidney had been found to replace the one lost in the botched surgery on his sister, Yolanda.

People normally wait years for a transplant. But Medina said doctors told him he was rushed to the top of a waiting list out of sympathy.

On Friday, he was discharged with bad news: The agency that oversees transplants doesn�t allow people to skip to the head of the line unless it is a medical emergency.

A BCG suspension table for displacement or force recording was designed and built in our Department of Physiological Sciences. A rigid, rectangular, metallic framework taken from an old clinical examination bed was used. Four nylon cords (80-kg load capacity each) were affixed to the upper framework at its four corners by means of four adjustable screws for a final suspension distance of 60 cm. A wood table (200 � 40 � 2 cm) was hung by the four nylon cords and perfectly balanced and leveled in the horizontal plane by the adjustable screws. All four nylon suspension cords were placed strictly perpendicular to the table. To reduce the bulk that will be impelled by the force vectors the wood table must be light enough, ≥10 times less than body weight; in the present case, the table was 3.8 kg. The surface of the BCG table must also be rough enough to ensure that the body impulse generated by the cardiac force vectors will be totally transmitted to the table without the body sliding. The surface of the table can be made rough enough by sandpapering.

A Political Meltdown
If you�ve ever had a cardiac perfusion test to see how the blood was flowing in and around your heart or a bone scan to determine whether your cancer had metastasized, then you, like some thirty million people around the globe every year, have been the beneficiary of medical isotopes. What makes these unstable atoms so handy is that they can be injected, swallowed, or inhaled, and once inside the body they emit radiation from predetermined places. From there, their radioactivity can be used to kill off cancer cells or, far more often, to etch a detailed picture of your innards.

Canada is the world�s largest single producer of medical isotopes. In fact, they were practically invented here. Most of the world�s isotopes are made inside nuclear reactors. In Canada, they�re produced in one in particular, at the Chalk River Laboratories nuclear facility, northwest of Ottawa. And when, in November 2007, that reactor was unexpectedly shut down, large parts of the world faced their first real �isotope crisis.� Their entire supply had suddenly been cut off.

This was when isotopes punctured the national consciousness. Doctors offered daily updates like sports scores about the thousands of patients who would be forced to forgo tests and what dire consequences this might have. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission said the reactor, which is owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, couldn�t be turned back on until a coolant pump was installed. Then parliamentarians stuck their noses in and voted unanimously to restart the reactor without the pump, overruling the nuclear regulator.

The government carefully framed the crisis as a medical calamity brought on by an overly persnickety regulator. The reactor was restarted in mid-December, and soon the hysteria died down. On the surface, everything went back to normal. But just a few months later, AECL abandoned two new nuclear reactors that had been built exclusively to produce medical isotopes. A year after that, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Canada was getting out of the isotope business altogether. �For whatever reason,� he said, �Atomic Energy was not able to make that project work.�

To many of us who�d been following the saga, that announcement felt like craziness. We were turning our backs on one of the best gigs going. Demand for isotopes is growing, and it�s a niche business: churning them out in mass volume requires a reactor. Perhaps best of all, isotopes seem distinctly Canadian � a feel-good by-product of an unpopular technology, a sort of peacekeeper of the nuclear world.

But in time, what I learned is that our isotope fiasco wasn�t really the result of an overly strict regulator or incompetent engineers. The new reactors were shuttered, and the industry was dispensed with, because it was far from being the lucrative money spinner many presumed it to be, and Harper knew the truth: that isotopes were hemorrhaging millions of dollars from the public coffers every month. It turns out that the lust to privatize federal assets some quarter century ago drove us to make a deal so bad that it put Canada�s future producing isotopes in jeopardy. A deal so bad that it made better economic sense to forfeit the whole industry than to pony up and fix it.

From Eureka Alert:

Nude-colored hospital gowns could help doctors better detect hard-to-see symptoms
Troy, N.Y. Changing the hue of hospital gowns and bed sheets to match a patient's skin color could greatly enhance a physician's ability to detect cyanosis and other health-related skin color changes, according to a new study from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"If a doctor sees a patient, and then sees the patient again later, the doctor will have little or no idea whether the patient's skin has changed color," said neurobiologist and study leader Mark Changizi, assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer. "Small shifts in skin color can have tremendous medical implications, and we have proposed a few simple tools - skin-colored gowns, sheets, and adhesive tabs - that could better arm physicians to make more accurate diagnoses."

Human eyes evolved to see in color largely for the purpose of detecting skin color changes such as when other people blush, Changizi said. These emotive skin color changes are extremely apparent because humans are hard-wired to notice them, and because the background skin color remains unchanged. The contrast against the nearby "baseline" skin color is what makes blushes so noticeable, he said.

Human skin also changes color as a result of hundreds of different medical conditions. Pale skin, yellow skin, and cyanosis - a potentially serious condition of bluish discoloration of the skin, lips, nails, and mucous membranes due to lack of oxygen in the blood - are common symptoms. These color changes often go unnoticed, however, because they often involve a fairly universal shift in skin color, Changizi said. The observer in most instances will just assume the patient's current skin color is the baseline color. The challenge is that there is no color contrast against the baseline for the observer to pick up on, as the baseline skin color has changed altogether.

Very very clever!

Hat tip to Neatorama for the link...

About time -- from the UK Guardian:

MPs deliver their damning verdict: Homeopathy is useless and unethical
Today the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy and it was devastating. The committee has called for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing of homeopathy.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who witnessed the almost farcical nature of the proceedings, with the elite of homeopathy mocked by their own testimony. Peter Fisher, director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, spewed forth the sort of dialogue that wouldn't look out of place in a Terry Pratchett novel. As the report drily observes:

"Dr Fisher stated that the process of 'shaking is important' but was unable to say how much shaking was required. He said 'that has not been fully investigated' but did tell us that 'You have to shake it vigorously [...] if you just stir it gently, it does not work'.

Quite. It's hard to say which is more ridiculous: the sight of a grown man speaking this nonsense, or the fact that after 200 years homeopaths apparenly haven't bothered to "fully investigate" how much shaking is required for their remedies to work. And yet, bizarrely, these people expect to be taken seriously.

In this they have failed spectacularly. The select committee report has brutally inflicted the 21st, 20th and 19th centuries on this 18th century magic ritual, and under inspection it has fallen apart.

The belief system that homeopaths operate under is bizarre -- the idea that it would have its group of followers now is unreal when you examine the basic tenants.

If so, Kerry Mullis may be doing just this. Excerpted from MedGaget:

The next person to keep the morning excitement going was Kary Mullis, who won the Noble prize in chemistry for developing PCR.

He discussed updates to his latest project (that was previously highlighted at TED; see video below) that involves taking randomly generated 30 base pair DNA oligonucleotide aptamers, or more simply, random lengths of DNA that have binding affinity to a variety of molecular substrates.

The idea is that it is relatively easy to create a massive library of aptamers that bind to almost anything at a highly selective level. So, if you've got a microbe you want to kill, you figure out which unique surface proteins it's got that you'd like to target and select an aptamer that binds to it.

Then, you take this aptamer and attach it to something that the body has a strong innate immune response to. This combination means that the aptamer binds to the microbe but is attached to a giant flag that tells your immune system to come over and eat up whatever the aptamer is bound to. The technology has been proven to completely eliminate anthrax in animal models and we're quite excited to see where it goes over the coming years.

Dr. Mullis' home page here and the page for his Altermune Project Talk about next generation...

Man who suffered hiccups for two years diagnosed with cancer
Christopher Sands, who has suffered from a constant bout of the hiccups for more than two years, has been diagnosed with a brain tumour, it has been disclosed.

Mr Sands, of Timberland near Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, hiccups persistently every two seconds when his condition is at its worst.

The musician, who is 25, has tried every cure possible, including hypnotherapy, Reiki and yoga.

A backing singer in a band, he has even had an operation to try to cure his hiccups, which at times have prevented him from sleeping and eating properly.

Experts at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham have previously said his condition was down to a damaged valve which had caused an acid reflux condition.

Doctors have managed to create a new valve linking his oesophagus and stomach to try to alleviate the problem.

But Mr Sands now thinks a Japanese doctor has found the cause of the problem - a 12mm tumour at the back of his brain.

The discovery came to light during an MRI scan in Tokyo after Mr Sands was flown out to Japan by a television station to see a hiccup specialist.

I love these -- I would so sell them in the store if I could get them cheap enough.

Hat tip Mark Perry at Carpe Diem Product here: Studio Samira Boon Online USA sale ($10 each) here: Compact-Impact

Stem cells to grow bigger breasts
A stem cell therapy offering "natural" breast enlargement is to be made available to British women for the first time.

The treatment could boost cup size while reducing stomach fat. It involves extracting stem cells from spare fat on the stomach or thighs and growing them in a woman's breasts. An increase of one cup size is likely, with the potential for larger gains as the technique improves.

A trial has already started in Britain to use stem cells to repair the breasts of women who have had cancerous lumps removed. A separate project is understood to be the first in Britain to use the new technique on healthy women seeking breast enlargement.

Professor Kefah Mokbel, a consultant breast surgeon at the London Breast Institute at the Princess Grace hospital, who is in charge of the project, will treat 10 patients from May. He predicts private patients will be able to pay for the procedure within six months at a cost of about €6,500.

10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care
Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government r�le in health care. Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered.

Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.

Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.

Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.

Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.

Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.

Copper door handles and taps kill 95% of superbugs in hospitals
Making door handles, taps and light switches from copper could help the country beat superbugs, scientists say.

A study found that copper fittings rapidly killed bugs on hospital wards, succeeding where other infection control measures failed.

In the trial at Selly Oak hospital, in Birmingham, copper taps, toilet seats and push plates on doors all but eliminated common bugs.

It is thought the metal 'suffocates' germs, preventing them breathing. It may also stop them from feeding and destroy their DNA.

Lab tests show that the metal kills off the deadly MRSA and C difficile superbugs.

It also kills other dangerous germs, including the flu virus and the E coli food poisoning bug.

Although the number of cases of MRSA and C difficile is falling, the two bugs still claim thousands of lives a year.

During the ten-week trial on a medical ward, a set of taps, a lavatory seat and a push plate on an entrance door were replaced with copper versions. They were swabbed twice a day for bugs and the results compared with a traditional tap, lavatory seat and push plate elsewhere in the ward.

The copper items had up to 95 per cent fewer bugs on their surface whenever they were tested, a U.S. conference on antibiotics heard yesterday.

Professor Tom Elliott, the lead researcher and a consultant microbiologist at the hospital, said: 'The findings of 90 to 95 per cent killing of those organisms, even after a busy day on a medical ward with items being touched by numerous people, is remarkable.

'I have been a consultant microbiologist for several decades. This is the first time I have seen anything like copper in terms of the effect it will have in the environment.

'It may well offer us another mechanism for trying to defeat the spread of infection.'

Researcher Professor Peter Lambert, of Aston University, Birmingham, said: 'The numbers decreased always on copper but not on the steel surfaces.'

If further hospital-based trials prove as successful, the researchers would like copper fixtures and fittings installed in hospitals around the country.