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...)
Tag: Pathology
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...)
Virtual Biopsy for Skin Lesions Using Vibrational Optical Coherence Tomography
Tissue biopsies of skin lesions can be unpleasant and quite painful. Moreover, a biopsy typically doesn’t sample the whole lesion and doesn’t provide much information about a given lesion’s size and depth. Now, scientists at Rutgers University have developed and tested a new device that relies on two different mechanisms to analyz (Read more...)
Ultra-Thin Probe Assesses Tissues Deep Within Lungs
Assessing the health of tissues deep inside the body is a major need and challenge in medicine. Imaging modalities such as MRI, CT, and ultrasound provide very little information about the composition and environment of tissues being examined. Now, researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University, and Bath University, all in the U (Read more...)
Mid-Infrared Imaging Made Practical for Medicine by Danish Researchers
Different wavelengths of light reveal the world in unique ways, but some are hard to see using the human eye and modern imaging technologies. Mid-infrared light, for example, can be used to look at a variety of biological processes in the body, but it is hard to track when it’s used to film at a […]
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...)
Artificial Intelligence to Speed up Alzheimer’s Disease Research
Researchers from UC Davis and UC San Francisco have developed a new artificial intelligence tool to scale up Alzheimer’s research. They have created a deep learning system to identify amyloid plaques in brain slices of patients, spotting specific subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease, in the process enabling precision medicine and faster rese (Read more...)
Haemonetics TEG 6s Hemostasis Analyzer Cleared for Trauma Testing
Haemonetics won FDA clearance for its TEG 6s Hemostasis Analyzer System to be used in adult trauma settings to evaluate the viscoelasticity of patients’ blood. The system relies on an all-in-one cartridge into which a small sample of blood is placed. The cartridge already has the necessary reagents within itself, automatically mixing them wit (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...)
Intestine Chip to Study Human-Microbiome Interactions
Researchers at the Harvard Wyss Institute have developed a microfluidic chip that allows bacteria and human epithelial cells to be co-cultured. The device will allow researchers to study how the gut and bacteria interact, helping them to identify the role of the microbiome in health and disease. With reported involvement in a huge array of [&hellip (Read more...)
Scorpion Protein Used to Help Visualize Brain Tumors
Clinicians at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Institute, along with scientists at Blaze Bioscience, Inc., have developed a new way to visualize brain tumors. The new imaging technique utilizes a special, high-sensitivity near-infrared camera developed at Cedars-Sinai, along with tozuleristide, or BLZ-100, the tumor-cell binding imaging agent developed by (Read more...)
Hologic Releases Trident HD Specimen Radiography System for Breast Tissue Analysis
Hologic is releasing its Trident HD specimen radiography system for use in stereotactic breast biopsies and for verifying tumor margins during breast-conserving surgeries. It has regulatory clearances in the United States and Europe, where it is now being made available. Such devices are typically used within the surgical environment to inspect exc (Read more...)
Optical Fibers for 3D Tissue Imaging Inside Body
Researchers at RMIT University in Australia have developed a technique to allow an optical fiber probe to obtain 3D images of tissues deep within the body. The technology could pave the way for minimally invasive 3D optical biopsies. An optical biopsy allows clinicians to view tissues in real-time within their native environment, and avoids the [&h (Read more...)
New Device Cleans Blood to Treat Preeclampsia
Preeclampsia is one of the most common serious maladies that pregnant women encounter. It is a poorly understood condition with symptoms such as high blood pressure, proteinuria, and headaches, potentially even leading to seizures. The treatment options for preeclampsia are still very limited, mostly confined to hypertension medications, bed rest, (Read more...)
Beckman Coulter Gets FDA Clearance for Early Sepsis Indicator
Sepsis continues to be a deadly malady that clinicians haven’t figured out how to tackle consistently. A major limitation of treatment is how early clinicians can identify that a patient is showing signs of sepsis. Beckman Coulter just received FDA clearance for its Early Sepsis Indicator, a cellular biomarker for the company’s DxH 900 (Read more...)
Microbial Signature for Colorectal Cancer Identified Using Machine Learning
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, the University of Trento in Italy, and other international collaborators leveraged a machine learning algorithm to identify a subset of gut bacteria associated with colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer worldwide. They performed a meta-analysis of ei (Read more...)