While there has been a good deal of progress in designing ever more advanced visual prostheses, some of the more impressive existing devices try to take over the functionality of the eye by directly stimulating the optic nerve or even the visual cortex of the brain. While this is impressive in itself, researchers at SUNY […]
(Read more...)Tag: Genetics
CRISPR-Responsive Materials Deliver Therapy on Biological Cues
CRISPR gene editing is a technique famous for its potential to edit the genomes of living organisms, including humans. Using the technique, it may be possible to reverse congenital conditions, kill off viruses, and do things previously only imagined. But now it has been employed to do something else entirely, and that is to give […]
Lensless Endoscope Captures 3D Images of Objects Smaller Than Individual Cells
Researchers from TU Dresden in Germany have developed a new ultrathin lensless endoscope for biomedical applications. Their work demonstrates that the endoscope, only 200 microns in diameter, can self-calibrate and adjust its focus to perform 3D imaging. This exciting development can be used for optogenetic applications, as well as monitoring cells (Read more...)
Artificial Protein Switch for Smart Cell Therapies
Researchers from University of California, San Francisco and the University of Washington have developed a new artificial protein switch, dubbed LOCKR. Their work demonstrates that the new switch can be used to control many intracellular processes, including mediating molecular traffic inside a cell, degrading specific proteins, and causing a cell (Read more...)
Using Microparticles to Measure Oxygen in Tissues
The field of tissue engineering is rapidly progressing, in large part thanks to hydrogel scaffolds that provide a comfortable home for new cells. A major issue that researchers bump against is tracking how well oxygen reaches freshly grown cells within such scaffolds, which can indicate how well the new cells are generally functioning. Now, researc (Read more...)
Generating Hallucinations Using Optogenetics
About a decade ago, Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University developed a technology called optogenetics. It allows scientists to stimulate individual nerve cells using light beams within the brains of live and moving animals. Now, this technology has been used to generate visual hallucinations within lab mice, causing them to act as though the things (Read more...)
New High-Res Holographic Microscope to Study Live Cells
Nanolive, a spinoff company of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, has just introduced a holographic microscope that can image live cells at high resolution over extended time periods. Nanolive’s CX-A device relies on a low energy light beam to penetrate the sample, which does not interfere wit (Read more...)
Lipid Nanoparticles Deliver CRISPR/Cas9 into Organs with High Efficiency
Researchers at Tufts University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a new lipid nanoparticle which can deliver CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tools into organs with high efficiency, suggesting that the system is promising for clinical applications. The CRISPR/Cas9 system is currently being investigated as a way to treat a variety of diseas (Read more...)
Artificial Bacterial Protein Allows Stem Cells to Home to the Heart
Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a way to make stem cells move toward heart tissue when they are injected intravenously. The treatment could improve the efficacy of stem cell therapies for heart disease, which are currently hampered when most injected cells are filtered out of circulation by organs such as the lungs [… (Read more...)
Microfluidic Chip Allows Embryonic Stem Cells to Differentiate
Complex multicellular organisms, such as ourselves, start out from stem cells that differentiate into different kinds of cells. This process is controlled by groups of cells that secrete special signaling molecules called morphogens, which guide nearby stem cells to turn into the kinds of cells that should be located in that region. This is an [&he (Read more...)
Floating Flexible Sensor to Monitor Engineered Tissues and Cell Cultures
Tissue engineering is a vibrant research field poised to revolutionize how we heal organs and tissues following damage from injury and disease. One of the difficulties that scientists working with cultured cells discover is the inability to closely monitor a number of characteristics of their cellular cultures. One reason is that water and electron (Read more...)
Low Cost Medical Devices for Low-Resource Regions: Interview with Prof. Saad Bhamla, Georgia Tech
Advances in medical technology continue apace, with sophisticated new medical devices and therapies becoming available on an ongoing basis. However, medical technology often comes at a premium, and for low-resource regions sometimes even relatively basic medical devices, such as hearing aids, are inaccessible because they are too expensive. Similar (Read more...)
DNA Microscopy Visualizes Genetic Content of Tissue Samples
Fundamentally new microscopy techniques don’t come out very often, but scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have just unveiled a new method of “imaging” tissue samples that provides a complex genetic and biomolecular picture of what’s going on inside individual cells. “It’s an entirely new category o (Read more...)
Scientists Develop Accurate Model of Blood-Brain Barrier
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is the primary reason that so few medicines exist to treat brain conditions. Drugs that can attack tumors elsewhere usually can’t penetrate the defenses of the BBB, so figuring out how to get through it is important for the development of future drugs and other therapies. There have been attempts to […]
Mini-Brain Platform Mimics Human Brain to Help Develop Drugs, Test Therapies
Studying the effect of potential therapies on the human brain is exceedingly difficult. Laboratory animals have proven to be less than ideal as mimics for identifying how a given therapy will work in people, leading to exceedingly long and difficult research journeys. Now AxoSim, a company based in New Orleans, will soon be making its […]
Liquid Biopsy for Monitoring Transplanted Stem Cells
Researchers from the University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University have demonstrated that a blood test can be used to track the efficacy of transplanted stem cells. They analyzed tiny cellular components called exosomes that were secreted from transplanted stem cells. “Exosomes contain the signals of the cells they& (Read more...)
3D Printed ELISA Pipette Tips for Low Cost Medical Testing
Researchers at the University of Connecticut have developed a 3D printed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) device, which fits onto a normal pipette and substantially reduces the time and cost of this common medical test. The device could allow for medical testing in remote or low-resource regions, where such tests would otherwise be unavail (Read more...)
Magnetic Beads Strip Blood Samples to Allow Circulating Tumor Cell Isolation
Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a microfluidic chip to isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples. Unlike other devices, this new chip uses magnetic microbeads to strip all the cells from the blood, leaving only the CTCs, in a technique the researchers have called “integrated ferrohydrodynamic cell separ (Read more...)
Synthetic Proteins Designed to Halt Growth of Cancers
Stanford University scientists have developed a novel approach to halting the growth of cancer cells while preserving normal function in healthy cells. The research was published in journal Science, and though it was so far conducted only on groups of cancer cells outside a body, the findings are incredibly promising. The new approach focuses on [& (Read more...)
System Separates, Sequences Circulating Tumor Cells from Whole Blood
Engineers at the University of Michigan have developed a high speed microfluidic chip that can separate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole blood and analyze them. The technology, which may make biopsies and other diagnostic tests unnecessary in many cases, is impressive in that it is able to attract highly rare CTCs and to sequence [… (Read more...)