Electrospinning is a manufacturing technique that has recently been getting a lot of attention in medicine because it allows researchers to produce novel materials and devices. Essentially, a polymer is melted and squeezed through a nozzle and an electric field is used to pull and spin it into a mesh of very fine fiber. The […]
Tag: Oncology
Tiny Medical Imaging Sensor Sets Guinness World Record
OmniVision Technologies, a Santa Clara, California firm, just announced that it has won the Guinness World Record for “The Smallest Commercially Available Image Sensor”. The OV6948 sensor was designed for use in catheters and endoscopes, allowing these devices to be as small as possible while also providing high quality imaging from wit (Read more...)
3D Liquid-Cell Electron Microscopy Imaging Now Possible
Electron microscopy revealed a world that exists at scales smaller than the wavelength of light. Advancements in this field have allowed scientists to visualize ever more objects and processes, but actually seeing living cells in 3D and within a liquid environment has been impossible. Now, a team of researchers from Penn State University, Virginia (Read more...)
Deep Learning Spots Organs on CT Scans to Prevent Radiation Damage
Radiotherapy is a well established method for attacking tumors within the body. There are a number of techniques that are used to administer radiation to a lesion, but they all come with the risk of injuring nearby tissues and organs. Gamma beams and other directed high energy devices result in the exposure of all the […]
3D Microenvironments to Grow Brain Tumors in Lab
Clinical researchers are constantly thwarted by the inability to quickly and easily try new therapies in tumors and other disease targets. Tumors within the brain are particularly hard to study because of the difficulty with access and the incredible fragility of nearby tissues. Researchers at Tufts University have just developed a way to create an (Read more...)
Red Light Activated Cancer Drug Improves Treatment in Mice
Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have developed a new, controllable cancer drug called phorbiplatin that only becomes active and potent after red light stimulation. Their work demonstrates that in the dark the cancer drug does not have substantial toxicity, but the drug is able to substantially reduce tumor size when activated by [ (Read more...)
New Imaging Technique Reveals Deep Tumors, Helps Attack Them
Tumors deep inside the body can be very difficult to spot, track, and study. The brain, being surrounded by a thick skull, is particularly challenging to image using light, so MRI and CT are currently the go-to imaging modalities when looking at deeply seated tissues. Now, researchers at Stanford University are reporting the development of [&hellip (Read more...)
Hyperspectral Surgical Microscope to See Cancer Cells in Real Time
Since internal cancerous tumors usually look exactly like the healthy tissues around them, frozen section analysis is used during and after surgeries to confirm that the entirety of a tumor has been removed. This is a slow process that often leads to patients requiring follow-up procedures. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have [&he (Read more...)
Nanoparticles for RNA Vaccine Delivery Help Stop Melanoma Tumor Growth
RNA vaccines are a promising way to harness the immune system to fight cancers and infections. Some are currently in clinical trials, but the technology is still in its early stages. A major impediment to the effectiveness of RNA vaccines is the difficulty in getting them into the correct immune cells to produce the desired […]
New Chip for Microwave Imaging of Body
Today’s clinicians are limited to a few imaging modalities, primarily X-ray, CT, MRI, and ultrasound. Microwaves, in principle, can also be used as a useful way to look inside the body. Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, so should be safer than X-rays, but in practice microwave imagers, because of the electronics inside, have remained bulky (Read more...)
Light Activated Compound Kills Hypoxic Tumors
Photodynamic therapy is a technique that relies on photosensitizer chemicals to generate reactive species that kill cancer cells. These compounds can be delivered into tumors and then light is used to activate them. One of the main reasons for the slow adoption of this technology is that tumors are usually oxygen deprived and the photosensitizers [ (Read more...)
Minimally Invasive Biopsies Provide Maximum Pathology Data
Current pathology techniques for analyzing biopsy tissues are lacking in their ability to detect cancer in small samples. Being able to rapidly study the distribution of protein expression within cells, gathered from minuscule samples, could be an important tool for early diagnosis and monitoring of cancer. Now, researchers at National University o (Read more...)
FDA Clears Siemens Artis icono Angiography Systems
Siemens Healthineers won FDA clearance for the ARTIS icono angiography systems that are designed for use in a variety of procedure types. The ARTIS icono 2D/3D biplane system is intended for neuroradiology and abdominal imaging while the ARTIS icono floor has a single fluoroscope and is designed for vascular, interventional cardiology, surgical, an (Read more...)
Siemens Healthineers Unveils Two New Radiotherapy Planning CT Scanners
Siemens Healthineers unveiled two new CT scanners specifically designed for radiation therapy planning. The SOMATOM go.Sim and SOMATOM go.Open Pro are 64-slice and 128-slice devices, respectively, and feature an 85 cm opening suitable for larger patients. To make patient prep easier and faster, the scanners come with an optional DirectLasers system (Read more...)
Magnetically Controlled Microbots for Drug Delivery and Hyperthermia Therapy in Cancer
Researchers in Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have developed biodegradable microrobots that can be magnetically controlled to deliver drugs and provide hyperthermia treatment at the site of a tumor. This latest research effort attempts to provide a delivery option for two different therapy pypes by creating biode (Read more...)
Injectable Hydrogel for Transcatheter Intravascular Embolization: Interview with Dr. Rahmi Oklu, Founder of Obsidio
Obsidio Inc., a medical device company based in Columbia, South Carolina, has developed an embolic hydrogel (called a gel embolic material: GEM) designed to be delivered minimally invasively through a clinical catheter for blood vessel occlusion. Applications include controlling blood flow in vascular injuries and aneurysms, reducing tumor blood su (Read more...)
Gold Nanoclusters Power a Simple Cancer Urine Test
Researchers at Imperial College London and MIT have developed a simple cancer urine test based on injected gold nano-clusters which enter the urine only in the presence of cancer. So far, the researchers have used the test to detect colon cancer in mice. A positive result is indicated through a simple color change, meaning that […]
Handheld MasSpec Pen for Molecular Cancer Detection During Surgeries
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new handheld pen for rapid intraoperative cancer detection. Their work demonstrates that the tool can identify different molecular profiles between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue without harming the sampled tissues. This exciting development can one day improve cancer diagnosis (Read more...)
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 […]
Plugging Holes in Blood Vessels Caused by Nanoparticle Therapy
While targeting nanoparticles to attack cancer cells can be effective at reducing primary tumors, they tend to create tiny holes within blood vessel walls that let some cancer cells escape and metastasize elsewhere. This is a serious side effect that may limit the usefulness of many nanoparticle-based cancer therapies in the long run, so researcher (Read more...)