The dependance on donor blood used for all kinds of medical purpose may be decreased now finally thanks to RED blood cells generated in a lab that have been successfully injected into a human volunteer for the first time. Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, extracted hematopoietic stem cells from a volunteer's bone marrow, and encouraged these cells to grow into red blood cells with a cocktail of growth factors. Douay's team labeled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (equalling 2 milliliters of blood) back into the marrow donor's body.
After five days, 94 to 100 per cent of the cells remained in circulation, while after 26 days, 41 to 63 per cent remained - a survival rate comparable to normal red blood cells. The cultured blood cells also gave every indication of being safe to use: they didn't transform into a malignant cell type, for example. Instead, they behaved like normal red blood cells, binding to oxygen and releasing it
This is great news for international health care. "The results show promise that an unlimited blood reserve is within reach," says Douay. The world is in dire need of a blood reserve, even with the rising donor numbers in the developed world. This need is even higher in parts of the world with high HIV infection rates, which have even lower reserves of donor-worthy blood.
Previously a type of synthetic blood was used to save a life but that was derived from cow's blood. The advantage it has that it doesn't require matching and can be stored without refrigeration for upto three years.
The stem cell method has its own pros, though. "The advantage of stem cell technology is that the product will much more closely resemble a red cell transfusion, alleviating some of the safety concerns that continue around the use of the current generations of artificial products," says Cooper.
Douay's next challenge is to scale up production to a point where the cultured blood cells can be made quickly and cheaply in sufficient quantities for blood transfusions. The 10 billion cells his team made wouldn't go very far - a transfusion typically requires 200 times that number. With his existing technology, Douay estimates that a single transfusion would require 400 litres of culture fluid, which is clearly impractical. "We are still a long way from the vision of dropping a couple of stem cells into the broth and making endless units of blood," says John Hess of the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
Douay believes that it may take several years to scale up the technology. Another possibility is to use embryonic stem cells instead, as Lanza did in 2008. "We can generate up to 100 billion red blood cells from a single six-well plate of stem cells," Lanza says.
Researchers have created an artificial lung that uses air as a ventilating gas instead of pure oxygen - as is the case with current man-made lungs, which require heavy tanks of oxygen that limit their portability. The prototype device was built following the natural lung's design and tiny dimensions and the researchers say it has reached efficiencies akin to the genuine organ. With a volume roughly the same as a human lung, the device could be implanted into a person and even be driven by the heart.
The artificial lung is filled with breathable silicone rubber versions of the blood vessels that branch down to a diameter less than one-fourth of human hair. It was created by first building a mould with miniature features and then layering on a liquid silicone rubber that solidified into artificial capillaries and alveoli. They air and blood channels were then separated with a gas diffusion membrane.
By making the parts of the artificial lung on the same scale as the natural lung, the researchers say they were able to create a very large surface-area-to-volume ratio and shrink the distances for gas diffusion compared to the current state-of-the-art. In comparison to current artificial lung systems that require pure oxygen due to their inefficient oxygen exchange, tests of the new artificial lung using pig blood showed a three to five times improvement in oxygen exchange efficiency over current devices. It is this efficiency that enables the new artificial lung to use plain air instead of pure oxygen as the ventilating gas.
Blood is injected into the device's fluid inlet, while air is fed into the gas inlet. Oxygen molecules diffuse across the gas exchange membrane into the blood on the way to the blood outlet, while carbon dioxide in the blood fed into the device would diffuse across the membrane to be released through the air outlet.
"Based on current device performance, we estimate that a unit that could be used in humans would be about 6 inches by 6 inches by 4 inches tall, or about the volume of the human lung. In addition, the device could be driven by the heart and would not require a mechanical pump," said Joe Potkay, a research assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Case Western Reserve University.
Potkay says the device is a major step towards an easily portable and implantable artificial lung and the team envisions patients using the technology while allowing their own diseased lungs to heal, or implanting one while awaiting a lung transplant.
Potkay's team, which includes Brian Cmolik, MD, an assistant clinical professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and Michael Magnetta and Abigail Vinson, biomedical engineers and third-year students at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is now collaborating with researchers from Case Western Reserve's departments of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering to develop a coating to prevent clogging in the narrow artificial capillaries and on construction techniques needed to build a durable artificial lung large enough to test in rodent models of lung disease.
The Case Western Reserve University researchers expect to have human-scale artificial lungs in use in clinical trials within a decade.
If you’re like me and you have a visceral reaction to the image above—if it makes your skin crawl, your hair hurt, and your stomach turn—you can count yourself among the trypophobic. According to its Facebook page, which is more than 4,000 members strong, trypophobia is fear of clustered holes. It is usually small holes in organic objects, such as lotus seed heads or bubbles in batter, that give trypophobics the extreme willies, triggering reactions like itchy skin, nausea and a general feeling of discomfort.
Although this may be of no comfort to those who suffer from it, trypophobia is simply one of an infinite number of fears that people experience, some more idiosyncratic than others. The onlinePhobia List, run by an amateur etymologist, contains the names of hundreds of fears, from the well-known (fear of heights: acrophobia) to the fringe (fear of the great mole rat: zemmiphobia). Trypophobia hasn’t made the list yet.
According to Martin Anthony, a psychologist at Ryerson University in Toronto, past-president of the Canadian Psychological Association and author of The Anti-Anxiety Workbook, with the exception of a few terms (agoraphobia, claustrophobia and arachnophobia among them), professionals who study and treat phobias tend not to use all the Latin and Greek names that get tossed around on message boards and in the press.
Anthony wasn’t surprised to hear that some people have an intense aversion to clustered holes because “people can be afraid of absolutely anything.” The factors that contribute to fears and phobias include traumatic experiences (getting bitten by a dog leading to a fear of dogs, for example), observational learning (watching others be afraid of heights), information and instruction (learning to fear being alone in the dark after watching too many horror movies), and various biological factors (like an inherited predisposition to anxiety). “Although the studies on causes of fears have all focused on more common ones, such as spiders and snakes, there is no reason to think that different factors would be responsible for more unusual fears, Anthony says.
Trypophobia may also be catching. An element of so-called emotional contagion seems to be at work on Facebook, where some group members say they didn’t realize they were trypophobic until they started reading others’ comments and clicking on the pictures. “It’s not unusual to laugh harder at a funny movie if others around you are laughing,” Antony explains. “In the same way, we may be more likely to experience fear in a particular moment if others around us are fearful.” For me, however, all it took was a verbal mention of a “fear of small holes” to illicit a shudder. I became disgusted before looking at a single gnarly image of a skin graft or lamprey eel (look ’em up) or reading an online comment. I also immediately assumed that we were talking about biologic objects—holes in wood, in particular. Clearly, in me the fear was preexisting.
One trypophobic reported on Facebook that her fear stems back to childhood, when she had a Renaissance Faire dagger with a handle covered in little holes. Another member wrote: “I was stung by a bee in high school on my outer thigh. I had an allergic reaction, and my skin started to swell. The swelling was so bad, I could see each individual pore on my leg and I freaked out. Since then, I have not been able to look at clusters of holes without getting the heebie-jeebies.” Just. Gross.
Fear and disgust often go hand in hand, Anthony says. “Evolutionarily speaking, almost all of the things that arouse a strong disgust-reaction--spiders, mice, blood, vomit--are things that could have been triggers for fear of illness.” Perhaps the same could be true for little holes, especially in natural objects where they seem particularly out of place. I suspect that we’re disgusted by pockmarked objects because they don’t look quite “right”; these perceived deformities signal danger, which we manifest as revulsion. But then again, a fear of asymmetry (another form of things looking not quite right) in some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder is not associated with disgust, Antony says. Perhaps holes, particularly in organic objects, subconsciously remind us of the symptoms of contagious illnesses that affect the skin, such as the rash or blisters associated with measles and chicken pox, respectively. All of this, of course, is speculation, and just goes to show how little we know about trypophobia.
Masai Andrews hopes that will change. Andrews, who runs Trypophobia.com, founded the Facebook group page in 2009 when he was a sociology minor at SUNY-Albany. “I started the website and Facebook page because I suspected this was a very common phobia and I wanted a place where people could compile information,” Andrews says. “It is my hope that one day the academic and scientific communities will, at the very least, acknowledge the aversion to holes and certain patterns.”
When that happens, a Wikipedia page dedicated to the fear should follow. Surprisingly, one doesn’t exist today. “I can barely keep a page up on the subject without it getting taken down,” Andrews says. In March 2009 the powers that be at Wikipedia determined trypophobia to be a “likely hoax and borderline patent nonsense.” The deletion page also says that Wikipedia is “not for things made up one day.” As for who actually made the word up, that distinction probably belongs to a blogger in Ireland named Louise, Andrews says. According to an archived Geocities page, Louise settled on “trypophobia” (Greek for “boring holes” + “fear”) after corresponding with a representative at the Oxford English Dictionary. Louise, Andrews and trypophobia Facebook group members have petitioned the dictionary to include the word. The term will need to be used for years and have multiple petitions and scholarly references before the dictionary accepts it, Andrews says. I, for one, would prefer to forget about it forever.
Want to find out if you’re trypophobic? Take this quick visual test. But beware: You may be skipping lunch today.
A new strain of the gonorrhea bacteria can resist all available antibiotics, doctors say. Gonorrhea is one of the world’s most common sexually transmitted diseases, so this could portend a major threat to public health.
This should actually not be surprising, because for some time now, just one class of drug has been able to successfully treat the infection.
Now researchers in Sweden and Japan identified a new variant of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bug that causes gonorrhea, that can survive that last remaining drug, the cephalosporin-class antibiotics. Researchers isolated the strain from the throat of a sex worker in Japan, the Los Angeles Times reports.
This month in amazing medical procedures, it’s all about Europe. Last week we learned that a pan-European team of researchers and doctors have successfully pulled off the first transplant of a synthetic organ grown from the patient’s own stem cells. This week, the world’s first double leg transplant was successfully executed in Spain.
Every year in the lead up to flu season, those at high risk of infection, such as the young, the elderly and those who are immune-compromised, head off to the doctor for a jab in the hopes it will protect them from the flu. However, influenza vaccines have a number of shortcomings that means even those who have been vaccinated may still get influenza. Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute and Dutch biopharmaceutical company Crucell have now found a broadly acting antibody that could lead to a single, near-universal flu vaccine to replace annually changing vaccines.
Wouldn’t it be easier to deal with disease if our bodies just fixed themselves? That’s asking quite a bit from our physiologies, but Israeli researchers are working on tiny nano-computers that could do the job for us. They envision tiny machines made of biomolecules that autonomously troll the body looking for disease, computing a diagnosis and delivering drugs all at the same time. It’s a long way off, but they’re making progress--they’ve just developed a biomolecular computer that can autonomously identify multiple molecules at the same time.
California researchers have created a tissue-engineered small-scale small intestine in mice, a breakthrough for regenerative medicine and a step toward growing new intestines for humans. The process re-creates all the layers of cells that make up a functioning intestine.
It's widely recognized that asthma rates have increased significantly since the 1960's and continue to rise. With increases in asthma and other allergic diseases centered on industrialized nations, a recent hypothesis suggested that the disappearance of specific microorganisms that populate the human body due to modern hygiene practices might be to blame. Now researchers claim they have confirmed this hypothesis by proving that a certain gastric bacterium provides reliable protection against allergy-induced asthma.
Concrete may be one of the toughest buildings materials in common use but it does develop cracks over time, and in the case of structures such as buildings or bridges, it is imperative that those cracks are noticed before they lead to a collapse. While visual inspections are useful, they are also time-consuming, and may miss tiny but structurally-significant cracks. Some technologies have been developed to automate the process, such as rust sensors for steel-reinforced concrete. Now, an international team of scientists is proposing a system of flexible crack-detecting skins, that could be applied to the surfaces of concrete surfaces.
Call it a twist on the study of gut bacteria. Scientists sampling DNA strains from the navels of volunteer donors have found 662 microbes that are apparently new to science, showing that the human navel is apparently a ripe environment for bacteria.
Last summer’s floods in Pakistan displaced millions of people--and millions of spiders. Although spiders rarely migrate to trees during natural disasters, the flooding was so heavy and prolonged, they had to climb trees and remain there. According to University of Akron biologist Todd Blackledge, who studies web-weaving spiders, some spin new webs each day. After weeks, the dense layers of silk, seen here in Sindh province, covered the trees--a result of continuous web spinning by the eight-legged refugees.
Overly-viscous blood can damage blood vessels and lead to heart attacks. Therefore, people who are at risk of heart attacks take medications such as Aspirin, in order to thin their blood. Such drugs can have unpleasant side effects, however, and can only be taken a certain number of times per day. Prof. Rongjia Tao, a physicist from Philadelphia's Temple University, now thinks he might have come up with a better way of thinning human blood - he subjects it to magnetic fields.
In the future, people who are prone to seizures may get an array of electrodes implanted in their brains. These electrodes would be capable of detecting the onset of a seizure, and then releasing medication to prevent it from happening. While it might sound far-fetched, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have already demonstrated the technology on lab rats.
Scientists probing the deadly E. coli strain in Europe are finding the bacteria combines a highly poisonous, but common, toxin with a rarely seen "glue" that binds it to a patient's intestines.
It may take months for the global team of researchers to fully understand the characteristics of the bacteria that has killed at least 17 people in Europe and sickened 1,500. But they fear this E. coli strain is the most toxic yet to hit a human population.
In a move that gives cautious hope to the millions of people suffering some form of paralysis, a team of researchers from UCLA, Caltech and the University of Louisville has given a man rendered paralyzed from the chest down after a hit-and-run accident in 2006 the ability to stand and take his first tentative steps in four years. The team used a stimulating electrode array implanted into the man's body to provide continual direct electrical stimulation to the lower part of the spinal cord that controls movement of the hips, knees, ankles and toes, to mimic the signals the brain usually sends to initiate movement.
A REVOLUTIONARY synthetic blood - straight out of science fiction - has saved the life of a Victorian woman.
Doctors at The Alfred brought Tamara Coakley, 33, back from the brink of death after a horrific car crash left her with severe blood loss and dangerously close to heart failure.
This was the first reported case of the synthetic blood reversing cardiac hypoxia and anaemia in a trauma patient.
DermaFuse, a glass nanofiber material that looks like cotton candy, has been shown to speed healing in difficult-to-treat wounds
Many diabetics suffer from a condition known as venous stasis, which can result in wounds on their extremities that remain unhealed for up to several years – if infection sets in, amputation of the limb is sometimes even necessary. Such wounds can sometimes be treated with vacuum-assisted systems, but the equipment required is expensive, and must be carried by the patient at all times. In clinical trials conducted last year, however, human venous stasis wounds were quickly and thoroughly healed with an inexpensive new glass nanofiber material, that looks like cotton candy.
Building a synthetic brain is no easy undertaking, but researchers working on the problem have to start somewhere. In doing so, engineers at the University of Southern California have taken a huge step by building a synthetic synapse from carbon nanotubes.
Biodegradable nanofiber microspheres show promise as a means of transporting cells to cartilage wound sites, where they can form new tissue and speed healing
Cartilage wounds can be very difficult to treat. While they may eventually heal on their own, the resulting tissue often won't take the same form – or allow for the same function – as the original. Cartilage injuries are often treated with a process known as ACI (autologous chondrocyte implantation), in which a patient's own cells are injected at the wound site to form new tissue. The procedure doesn't always work, as the cells are just injected loosely, with no carrier to transport them or help them get established. Now, however, a scientist from the University of Michigan has developed a technique in which cells are delivered to wounds via injectable nanofiber spheres, and the results are said to be very promising.
