Innovation

Drug companies have long used plants to produce pharmaceuticals--and tobacco plants, perhaps ironically, have been explored for their potential role in fighting such things as cancer, cavities, scorpion venom, and more.

The latest big news, announced at a press conference in London this morning, is that U.K. regulators have, for the first time, approved a human clinical trial of a monoclonal antibody produced using genetically modified tobacco plants.

Monoclonal antibodies are made from identical immune cells that have been cloned from a unique parent cell to fulfill a specific role. The roots of this idea, which date back more … Read more

Some people pay a lot of money for sunglasses that do very little. If new glare-fighting tech comes to market, they could continue paying a lot of money, but for sunglasses that actually protect their eyes from the sun's harsh glare.

Since 2003, when he founded Dynamic Eye, entrepreneur Chris Mullin has been working on eyewear tech that can detect bright spots of light and then darken specific regions of the lenses to block that glare. He has now teamed up with the University at Buffalo to bring to develop sunglasses employing this tech.

"Our products let users … Read more

A smart bed that automatically repositions a patient throughout both day and night may soon come to market in Switzerland, according to a report on the conclusion of the start-up's first round of financing.

Michael Sauter, the young entrepreneur and mechanical engineer who came up with the concept two years ago with funding from Empa and the ETH Zurich and launched the spin-off company Compliant Concept, says an industrial partner will help manufacture the first beds, possibly by the end of 2011.… Read more

What if, instead of waiting a few weeks for your dentist to produce a cast for dental implants or replacement crowns, your jaw was scanned and, during that same dentist's visit, you were able to pull a perfect polymer shape out of a 3D printer and be on your merry way?

Mechanical engineers in Iran report in the International Journal of Rapid Manufacturing that printing our own teeth may not be so far off into the future.

While the process could be prohibitively expensive for years to come, it turns out that 3D printing, coupled with the comparatively affordable cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT), may ultimately revolutionize prosthetic dentistry.

The tech, called rapid prototyping, uses a 3D image to control a laser that cures powdered or liquid polymer into highly complex shapes. In fact, Hossein Kheirollahi of the Imam Hossein University and Farid Abbaszadeh of the Islamic Azad University say this technology can produce just about any solid, porous, or complicated shape.

While the Iranian team has been able to demonstrate the use of rapid prototyping in developing dental objects quickly, we're likely at least a few years out from actual commercial development.

Below, watch tool replication via 3D printing:… Read more

PR2, the beer-fetching, laundry-folding, breakfast-making jack of all trades robot, has taken up a job as personal assistant for a man disabled by a stroke.

Maker Willow Garage has partnered with Georgia Tech's Charlie Kemp and colleagues of the Healthcare Robotics Lab to help Henry Evans and his wife Jane in a project dubbed Robots for Humanity.

It sounds rather grandiose, but the humanoid robot has made a real difference in the life of Evans, who suffered a brain stem stroke at age 40 that left him paralyzed and mute. Therapy has enabled him to move his head and a finger.

That allows him to use a computer and control PR2. The bot helped him scratch an itch for the first time in 10 years.

As the vid below shows, Evans prefers to shave himself with PR2 rather than have others do it. … Read more

The term "sudden infant death syndrome" is vague for a reason; it names the unexpected and inexplicable death of a child under age 1. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that roughly 2,500 babies in the U.S. alone die from SIDS each year.

While the cause of the syndrome remains unknown, researchers theorize that a big drop in heart rate precedes the death--which is why two students at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel have been busy working on a computer system that would sound an alarm should an infant's heart rate drop below a certain level.

Using what is described as a basic video camera with a home computer, the researchers added software which, while still being developed, actually monitors the baby's skin tone to detect a drop in pulse.… Read more

The explosion of social media has given researchers a lot of data to mine and trends to identify, but two computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University say they've developed sophisticated filtering software that is attracting particular attention from public health officials.

Twitter, which launched five years ago, has already been used by computer scientists to try to track the flu.

But when Johns Hopkins University computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael Paul devised a method to filter and categorize health-related tweets, they weren't sure what they might find. So they decided to sort the tweets (they filtered 1.… Read more

Being able to regenerate injured heart cells would give physicians the tools to repair and replace damaged tissue and ultimately save lives. So while researchers have spent more than a decade trying to reprogram cell types in general, changing them into heart cells has been a sort of holy grail.

Now, a team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has done just that--and is the first to directly convert a non-heart cell type into a heart cell via RNA transfer. In fact, the researchers reprogrammed both an astrocyte (a star-shaped brain cell) and a fibroblast (a skin cell) into heart cells.

"What's new about this approach for heart-cell generation is that we directly converted one cell type to another using RNA without an intermediate step," says James Eberwine, a pharmacology professor at Penn, in a news release.

Because a cell's signature is characterized by messenger RNAs (mRNAs), which act as a sort of blueprint for making a protein, the researchers introduced an excess amount of heart cell mRNAs into the host cells and let the new, abundant population essentially take over the smaller, indigenous one. This new population then directed DNA in the host nucleus to actually change the cell's RNA populations to the new heart cell ("tCardiomyocyte").

Ultimately, the heart-cell mRNAs are translated into heart-cell proteins, which influence gene expression in the host so that heart-cell genes are turned on and heart-cell-enriched proteins are made. The chain of events may be lengthy, but the process is direct.

The team's approach, called Transcriptome Induced Phenotype Remodeling, has been fine-tuned in Eberwine's lab in recent years.

While it may be a way off, the team says that reprogramming a patient's cells to be heart cells would enable personalized screening for efficacy of drug treatments and new drugs. It reports its findings online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read more

NASA's historic final mission of its 30-year space shuttle program may be delayed a day or two because of weather, but regardless of when the Atlantis launches, it will be delivering a customized, cutting-edge cardiovascular ultrasound system to the International Space Station.

The Vivid q is, according to GE Healthcare, a compact, lightweight diagnostic ultrasound system roughly the size of a laptop. It has been designed to image and assess cardiac performance in space, and to investigate the association between lengthy space missions and the weakening of astronauts' heart muscles.

The crew will also participate in the Integrated Resistance and Aerobic Training Study to determine whether high-intensity, low-volume exercise can minimize loss of muscle, bone, and cardiovascular function in the crew.

In March, 3M and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency announced they'd be installing the Littmann Scope-to-Scope Tele-Auscultation System on the International Space Station to enable physicians to listen to the heartbeats of space travelers. Presumably, the Vivid q will replace not just the 10-year-old ultrasound previously used, but eventually the high-tech stethoscope, too.… Read more