Cancer cells rely on their cytoskeletons to move away from where they are born, resulting in metastasis of the cancer. This process has been a challenge to prevent, but doing so can go a long way toward successfully killing cancers before they’re allowed to spread. Researchers at Georgia Tech are now reporting in Proceedings of the (Read more...)
Tag: Genetics
Tiny Barometric Sensor to Detect Presence of Disease Biomarkers
Researchers from Jinan University in Guangzhou, China and Washington State University have developed a novel type of sensor that works by measuring pressure changes induced by the production of oxygen (O2). The technology may miniaturize and make readily available testing of a wide variety of biomarkers. The team of researchers has already demonstr (Read more...)
Organs-on-Chip with Tiny Electrodes Sense Electrical Activity, Resistance of Cells
Organ-on-chip technology promises to help speed up and improve research on how potential new drugs will interact with the body’s own organs. Additionally, it may alleviate the need for in-animal studies that can be difficult to perform and that too often produce misleading results. Organs-on-chip are essentially specialized microfluidic devic (Read more...)
Magnets and Nanoparticles for On-Demand Leaky Vessels
Scientists at Rice University have developed a method to open gaps between the endothelial cells that line blood vessels using a magnetic field and iron oxide nanoparticles. The gaps close by themselves after the researchers remove the magnets. They hope that the concept could be used to help deliver larger therapeutic molecules like proteins to [& (Read more...)
Scientists Keep Bits of Hearts Alive Under High Speed Cameras to Study Arrhythmias
Detecting the source of errant electric signals in the heart that cause cardiac arrhythmias, as well as understanding what causes them, has been a notoriously difficult challenge for both physicians and researchers. This is because the heart is difficult to study, but researchers at Ohio State University have come up with a new technique that [&hel (Read more...)
Microchip for Sorting and Identifying Large Numbers of Circulating Tumor Chips
Detection and classification of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) may soon become a common method for screening for multiple types of cancer. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) is popular one technique for spotting CTCs, but it’s limited because the number of available dye colors is small and because for CTCs of certain cancers ther (Read more...)
Diagnosing Multiple Sclerosis with a Blood Test: Interview with IQuity CEO, Dr. Chase Spurlock
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that afflicts an approximate 2.5 million patients world-wide, giving rise to multiple issues regarding quality of life and the potential for disability. Up to 15,000 people are newly diagnosed with MS every year in the US, while another 45,000 experience a clinical precursor with similar symptom (Read more...)
Microchip Sorts DNA Fragments by Size in Minutes
At the University of Twente in The Netherlands, scientists have come up with a rapid and inexpensive way of separating out DNA fragments from a sample. The technology will help speed up DNA sequencing, which normally relies on using computers to virtually combine millions of DNA fragments into a single string. Currently, the so-called fraction (Read more...)
MIT Scientists Develop Microfluidic Device to Screen Biologics for Quality During Production
Biologics, which are drugs made of biochemical compounds produced by living organisms, are becoming more common to treat a variety of conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, chronic plaque psoriasis, and breast cancer. They’re usually proteins that are immensely easier to produce by plant or animal cells than synthesizing them from s (Read more...)
Adaptive Optics Technique for Visualizing Huge Groups of Cells Simultaneously
Researchers at Purdue University have developed technology that lets them view and analyze the activity of thousands of cells simultaneously, gathering huge amounts of data that was previously only available for small groups of cells. All in all, the investigators are able to gather up to 30 million datapoints on large groups of cells every [&helli (Read more...)
23andMe: A Medgadget Review
In 2007, Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe transformed personalized health with the unveiling of a direct to consumer genetic testing service in which subscribers would receive information about their ancestry, physical traits, and disease carriers by simply providing a saliva sample via mail to the company’s labs. Since then, 23andMe h (Read more...)
Laser Treated Graphene Circuits Push Stem Cells to Differentiate Into Neural Schwann Cells
Schwann cells are important targets for stem cell therapy because they surround neural axons and can help regrow damaged or diseased nerves, potentially restoring movement to disabled arms and legs. Differentiating such cells has been difficult, but researchers at Iowa State University may have stumbled on a technique that will allow for mass produ (Read more...)
Stretching Cells with Laser Pulses
The establishment of cell culture systems opened the door to an unparalleled revolution in biomedical science, but this common lab practice remains drastically artificial and is often not translatable to real-life in vivo systems. This limitation is particularly notable in efforts aiming to understand the mechanisms regulating responses of cells an (Read more...)
Light Used to Activate Select Proteins Inside Living Cells
At the University of Alberta in Canada, researchers have devised a way of activating proteins inside a living cell using a beam of light. This will allow scientists to study how the activation of certain proteins affects the functionality of a cell. The technological breakthrough consists of attaching a photocleavable protein, one that can be (Read more...)
Japanese Researchers Develop New Filter to Use microRNA as Disease Biomarker
Cancers tend to produce microRNA molecules that are present in whole blood and, if isolated and sequenced, can serve as excellent biomarkers for the presence of cancer. Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have come up with a device that can rapidly separate microRNAs from a mixture of RNA and DNA, opening the door for […]
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Tiny Paper Pumps to Power Microfluidic Devices
Microfluidic technology promises to make a lot of medical tests, that are currently expensive and difficult to perform, a lot cheaper, easier, and more portable. While there’s been a tremendous amount of progress in this field, challenges remain. One is that microfluidic devices coming out of labs are often powered by much larger, external pu (Read more...)
Scientists 3D Print Microscopic Vascular Networks for Building Living Tissues
Creating living tissues in the lab requires closely mimicking their natural internal structure. In addition, capillary networks that carry oxygen and nutrients are critical to successfully sustaining the life of cells in the integrated tissue environment. Researchers at University of California, San Diego have developed a method of printing tiny (4 (Read more...)
Lasers Measure Cells’ Stiffness to Identify Neoplastic Ones
Unusual softness or stiffness is often an indicator of the presence of cancer in what otherwise may look like healthy tissue. There are already devices on the market that feel how elastic a given tissue is, but they come in contact and sample a very large number of cells at once. Researchers at Duke University have […]
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Nano-Scale Straws for Non-destructive Monitoring of a Cell’s Interior
Routine lab work to examine a host of biological parameters often depends on destructively lysing, or bursting, cells to release their contents for measurement. While this simple technique has been used for decades, it creates a constraint on protocol design because a given cell can only be analyzed once (when lysed) in a snapshot-like manner. [&he (Read more...)
Vortex Unveils VTX-1 Liquid Biopsy System for Easy Capture of Circulating Tumor Cells
Vortex Biosciences of Menlo Park, California just launched its VTX-1 Liquid Biopsy System, a device that automates the extraction of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole blood. The filter-free technology is based on microfluidic chips with a series of connected boxes linked by narrow channels. As blood is carefully pushed through the system, l (Read more...)