Today’s technological innovation enables smartphone users to diagnose serious diseases such as diabetes or lung cancer quickly and effectively by simply breathing into a small gadget, a nanofiber breathing sensor, mounted on the phones.

Cell- Phones, Sensors Diagnose Diabetes

Il-Doo Kim, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) -Korea -, and his research team have recently published a cover paper entitled “Thin-Wall Assembled SnO2 Fibers Functionalized by Catalytic Pt Nanoparticles and their Superior Exhaled Breath-Sensing Properties for the Diagnosis of Diabetes,” in an academic journal, Advanced Functional Materials (May 20th issue), on the development of a highly sensitive exhaled breath sensor by using hierarchical SnO2 fibers that are assembled from wrinkled thin SnO2 nanotubes.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

According to new research from the Monell Center – Philadelphia – and collaborating institutions, odors from human skin cells can be used to identify melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In addition to detecting a unique odor signature associated with melanoma cells, the researchers also demonstrated that a nanotechnology-based sensor could reliably differentiate melanoma cells from normal skin cells. The findings suggest that non-invasive odor analysis may be a valuable technique in the detection and early diagnosis of human melanoma.
Melanoma is a tumor affecting melanocytes, skin cells that produce the dark pigment that gives skin its color. The disease is responsible for approximately 75 percent of skin cancer deaths, with chances of survival directly related to how early the cancer is detected. Current detection methods most commonly rely on visual inspection of the skin, which is highly dependent on individual self-examination and clinical skill.
The current study took advantage of the fact that human skin produces numerous airborne chemical molecules known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, many of which are odorous.

“There is a potential wealth of information waiting to be extracted from examination of VOCs associated with various diseases, including cancers, genetic disorders, and viral or bacterial infections,” notes George Preti, PhD, an organic chemist at Monell who is one of the paper’s senior authors.
In the study, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Chromatography B, researchers used sophisticated sampling and analytical techniques to identify VOCs from melanoma cells at three stages of the disease as well as from normal melanocytes.

Source: http://www.monell.org/

French company Carmat has won approval to proceed with the first human implantations of its artificial heart in four countries, sending its shares up 25 percent. The approval were given by the four international cardiac surgery centers in Belgium, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Slovenia, where the tests will be carried out, but not in France, where Carmat’s artificial heart is still to gain approval from the drug safety agency, ANSM. Among Carmat’s competitors are privately-held SynCardia Systems and Abiomed Inc., both of the United States.

“The patient selection process and the training of the clinical teams are ongoing in these four countries (…) Implantations could start shortly following the completion of the training,” Carmat said in a press release.

Developed by a team of engineers from Airbus parent company EADS, the Carmat devices – expected to cost 150,000 euros ($193,600) each - mimic heart muscle contractions with two micro pumps, one for each ventricle or heart chamber. The device moves blood to the lungs and into the body. The new design uses cutting-edge biopolymer materials that promise to reduce the formation of dangerous blood clots—a persistent problem with early artificial hearts—and may even spare patients from needing to use nettlesome anticoagulant drugs. Around 5.7 million people in the U.S. have heart failure at any given time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In these patients, the heart’s pumping abilities have grown so weak that it cannot deliver enough oxygen and nutrients to the body.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/

Chemists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a sensor technology that could significantly simplify the diagnosis and monitoring of diabetes through breath analysis alone.
Even before blood tests are administered, those with diabetes often recognize the condition’s symptoms through their breath acetone—a characteristic “fruity” odor that increases significantly with high glucose levels. The Pitt team was interested in this biomarker as a possible diagnostic tool.

“Once patients are diagnosed with diabetes, they have to monitor their condition for the rest of their lives,” said Alexander Star, principal investigator of the project and Pitt associate professor of chemistry. “Current monitoring devices are mostly based on blood glucose analysis, so the development of alternative devices that are noninvasive, inexpensive, and provide easy-to-use breath analysis could completely change the paradigm of self-monitoring diabetes.”
The research has been published in in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

Source: http://www.news.pitt.edu/

Researchers from Cornell University are working on Smartphone Based Molecular Diagnostics. The technologies developed will enable you to monitor your own blood chemistry with your smartphone. Enabling personalized knowledge of our own physiological and nutritional status could dramatically enhance our quality of life. The idea: by 2016 there will be 250 million smartphones in use in the US. The newsystems that can exploit the ubiquity of smartphone for personalized monitoring of important elements of blood chemistry, like vitamins and micronutrients. The system exploits a series of microfluidic components, photonic technologies, and standard smartphone capabilities to analyze the content of a blood sample taken from a finger stick. The system is comprised of a reusable “accessory”, that interfaces directly with the USB port of the smartphone and contains the optical interrogation infrastructure, and a consumable “cartridge” or “chip”, that accepts the blood sample, processes it, and conducts the detection assay. Analysis results are displayed to the user via an on-board “app”, compared with optimal levels, and recommendations provided regarding any treatments.

Smartphone Based Molecular Diagnostics. This new technology will enable you to monitor your own blood chemistry with your smartphone. Enabling personalized knowledge of our own physiological and nutritional status could dramatically enhance our quality of life

The research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Cornell Nanobiotechnology Center.

Source: http://nano.mae.cornell.edu/

Since the heart is such a del­i­cate and crit­ical organ, clin­i­cians usu­ally opt not to inter­vene with the dead cells that remain after a heart attack or car­diac dis­ease. “But we think that all heart attacks deserve some kind of treat­ment because it puts so much stress on the rest of the heart,” said Thomas Web­ster, pro­fessor and chair of the Depart­ment of Chem­ical Engi­neering at Northeastern University. “Even a square cen­timeter of dead heart tissue can put sig­nif­i­cant strain on the rest of the heart, which has to pick up the slack”, he said.

Webster’s ear­lier work demon­strated that adding nanofea­tures to an implanted med­ical device like a tita­nium knee or hip joint helps the car­ti­lage cells adhere to the device. This pro­motes tissue growth and allows the patient to heal more readily, he explained. While his team mem­bers don’t know exactly why this hap­pens, they have a good idea. They think the nanofea­tures allow the sur­face to more accu­rately mimic the nat­ural envi­ron­ment in the body, thus pro­viding more hab­it­able accom­mo­da­tions for the new cells.

But tita­nium hearts aren’t a viable option. Instead, they uti­lized a hydrogel, which they’d devel­oped pre­vi­ously, to mimic the heart cells them­selves. They added carbon nan­otubes to the hydrogel, making it con­duc­tive, and then injected the mate­rial into the heart, where it solid­i­fies at body tem­per­a­ture. Because the hydrogel is “super sticky,” it adheres extremely well to the tissue sur­face and imme­di­ately begins expanding and con­tracting in sync with the beating of the heart. While the team hasn’t yet tested the mate­rial in an animal model, it has sim­u­lated these con­di­tions in the lab.

Source: http://www.northeastern.edu/

Two independent teams (University of Caliofornia Los Angeles -UCLA- and University of California Santa Cruz -UCSC-) have developed new optics-based methods for determining the exact viral load of a sample by counting individual virus particles. These new methods are faster and cheaper than standard tests and they offer the potential to conduct the measurements in a medical office or hospital instead of a laboratory. The teams will present their latest results at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO: 2013), to be held June 9-14, in San Jose, Calif.

Photograph of 1cm x 1cm optofluidic chip for direct detection of viral nucleic acids

“Because viruses are very small–less than 100 billionths of a meter–compared to the wavelength of light, conventional light microscopy has difficulty producing an image due to weak scattering of sub-wavelength particles,” says Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA. When lighted, the team’s new nanolens-nanoparticle assembly projects a hologram that can be recorded using a CMOS imager chip (a type of semiconductor-based light detector) and digitally reconstructed to form an optical image of the particle. “The resulting image improves the field-of-view of a conventional optical microscope by two orders of magnitude,” says Ozcan.
Source: http://www.osa.org/

University of Louisville – UofL -researchers have uncovered how to create nanoparticles using natural lipids derived from grapefruit, and have discovered how to use them as drug delivery vehicles. Grapefruits have long been known for their health benefits, and the subtropical fruit may revolutionize how medical therapies like anti-cancer drugs are delivered to specific tumor cells.The researchers demonstrated that GNVs can transport various therapeutic agents, including anti-cancer drugs, DNA/RNA and proteins such as antibodies. Treatment of animals with GNVs seemed to cause less adverse effects than treatment with drugs encapsulated in synthetic lipids.

“Our GNVs can be modified to target specific cells – we can use them like missiles to carry a variety of therapeutic agents for the purpose of destroying diseased cells,” said Huang-Ge Zhang, from The School of Medecine – University of Louisville. “Furthermore, we can do this at an affordable price.”

The therapeutic potential of grapefruit derived nanoparticles was further validated through a Phase 1 clinical trial for treatment of colon cancer patients. So far, researchers have observed no toxicity in the patients who orally took the anti-inflammatory agent curcumin encapsulated in grapefruit nanoparticles.

UofL scientists Huang-Ge Zhang, D.V.M., Ph.D., Qilong Wang, Ph.D., and their team, published their findings in Nature Communications.
Source: http://louisville.edu/

A new tool being developed by the University of Texas Arlington (UT Arlington) assistant professor Samarendra Mohanty could help scientists map and track the interactions between neurons inside different areas of the brain. More the development of a fiber-optic, two-photon, optogenetic stimulator and its use on human cells in a laboratory could lead to grew new brains. The tiny tool builds on Mohanty’s previous discovery that near-infrared light can be used to stimulate a light-sensitive protein introduced into living cells and neurons in the brain. This new method could show how different parts of the brain react when a linked area is stimulated.

“Scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the physical connections between different regions of the brain. But that information is not sufficient unless we examine how those connections function,” Mohanty said. “That’s where two-photon optogenetics comes into play. This is a tool not only to control the neuronal activity but to understand how the brain works.”

Source: https://www.uta.edu/

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University – OHSU – have made a significant breakthrough in efforts to develop human stem cell therapies that may be used to combat numerous devastating diseases. For the first time, scientists have successfully derived embryonic stem cells by reprogramming of genetic material from skin cells while studying rhesus macaque monkeys. The breakthrough follows several previously unsuccessful attempts by the OHSU-based team and other scientific teams worldwide.

“Many scientists believe that embryonic stem cells hold great promise for treating a variety of diseases including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cardiac disease and spinal cord injuries,” explained Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph.D., director of the OHSU-based research team. “Using our advanced methods, it is conceivable that years from now, patients could receive therapeutic embryonic stem cells developed from their very own cells meaning that there would be no concerns about transplant rejection. Another noteworthy aspect of this research is that it does not involve the use of fertilized embryos, a topic which has been the source of a significant ethical debate in this country. ”

Neverthless “it’s a matter of time before they produce a cloned monkey,” said Jose Cibelli, a cloning expert at Michigan State University, who wasn’t involved in the study. It also means, he added, “that they are one step closer to where the efficiency is high enough that someone is willing to try” to clone a person.

The results of the work were released online by the scientific journal Nature.
Source: http://www.ohsu.edu

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors. Synthetic silicates are made up of simple or complex salts of silicic acids, and have been used extensively for various commercial and industrial applications, such as food additives, glass and ceramic filler materials, and anti-caking agents.

“With an aging population in the US, injuries and degenerative conditions are subsequently on the rise,” said Ali Khademhosseini, PhD, BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, senior study author. “As a result, there is an increased demand for therapies that can repair damaged tissues. In particular, there is a great need for new materials that can direct stem cell differentiation and facilitate functional tissue formation. Silicate nanoplatelets have the potential to address this need in medicine and biotechnology.”
The study has been published online May 13, 2013 in Advanced Materials.

Source: http://www.brighamandwomens.org/

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast have devised a ‘magic bullet’ nanomedicine which could become the first effective treatment for Acute Lung Injury or ALI, a condition affecting 20 per cent of all patients in intensive care. Many with the condition die as a result of lung failure.
ALI patients can become critically ill and develop problems with breathing when their lungs become inflamed and fill with fluid. The new drug, a nanoparticle, measuring around one billionth of a metre. could revolutionise clinical management of patients in intensive care units. The patient can inhale it, taking the drug directly into the lungs and to the point of inflammation. Current treatments are unable to target directly the inflammation and can result in unpleasant side effects.

“Nanoparticles are perhaps one of the most exciting new approaches to drug development. Most research in the area focuses on how the delivery of drugs to the disease site can be improved in these minute carriers. Our own research in this area focuses on how nanoparticles interact with cells and how this can be exploited to produce therapeutic effects both in respiratory disease and cancer.”, said Professor Chris Scott from the School of Pharmacy, who is leading the research.

Source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/

Using the SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) model in Chinese macaques, a research group headed by Jean-Marie Andrieu from University PARIS V – France – with Wei Lu from University of Montpellier were able to suppress the initial activation of SIV- positive CD4+ T-lymphocytes in vivo which is the crucial step that allows SIV to initiate replication and to establish infection. They used an oral vaccine made of inactivated SIVmac239 associated with a common commensal bacterium of the digestive tract known as Lactobacillus plantarum which is known to induce immunological tolerance to foreign antigens.
In contrast to what happens with all anti-viral vaccines, this oral
tolerogenic vaccine elicited neither anti-SIV antibodies nor cytotoxic
T-lymphocytes but induced instead a previously unrecognized class of
SIV- specific, non-cytolytic CD8+ T-regulatory cells which prevented SIV+ CD4+ T-cell activation and suppressed SIV replication.
By blocking SIV reverse transcription in CD4+ T-cells, the initial burst of virus replication was prevented and the vaccinated macaques were protected from infection. Of the 16 vaccinated macaques that were challenged intra-rectally 3 to 14 months later with the homologous SIV strain as well as with the heterologous strainSIV-B670, 15 were solidly protected from SIV challenge.

Since CD4+ T-cell activation
drives both the initial SIV and HIV-1 replication in macaques and
humans respectively, it is plausible that such a tolerogenic vaccine may
also be effective against HIV-1 in humans and this will be certainly be
investigated in the near future, either as a preventive or therapeutic
vaccine..

Test on humans will start by the end of this year.
Source: http://www.parisdescartes.fr/
In english: Ask for PDF document at:
Alice Tschudy
Press Officer
Université Paris Descartes
+33 1 76 53 18 63 / 17 98
presse@parisdescartes.fr

Take a swab of saliva from your mouth and within minutes your DNA could be ready for analysis and genome sequencing with the help of a new device. Now University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods. The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

Hand-held device for extracting DNA
“It’s very complex to extract DNA,” said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the research. “When you think of the current procedure, the equivalent is like collecting human hairs using a construction crane.”
The small, box-shaped kit now is ready for manufacturing, then eventual distribution to hospitals and clinics.

Source:http://www.washington.edu/

In a promising development for diabetes treatment, researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be injected into the body and release insulin when blood-sugar levels rise, maintaining normal blood sugar levels for more than a week in animal-based laboratory tests. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston.

The nano-network releases insulin in response to changes in blood sugar

“We’ve created a ‘smart’ system that is injected into the body and responds to changes in blood sugar by releasing insulin, effectively controlling blood-sugar levels,” says Dr. Zhen Gu, lead author of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill. “We’ve tested the technology in mice, and one injection was able to maintain blood sugar levels in the normal range for up to 10 days.”
Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability. The researchers’ primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue. The scientists used 3D printing of cells and nanoparticles followed by cell culture to combine a small coil antenna with cartilage, creating what they term a bionic ear.

“In general, there are mechanical and thermal challenges with interfacing electronic materials with biological materials,” said Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher. “Previously, researchers have suggested some strategies to tailor the electronics so that this merger is less awkward. That typically happens between a 2D sheet of electronics and a surface of the tissue. However, our work suggests a new approach — to build and grow the biology up with the electronics synergistically and in a 3D interwoven format.”

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

University of Florida researchers have developed a “DNA nanotrain” that fast-tracks its payload of cancer-fighting drugs and bioimaging agents to tumor cells deep within the body. The nanotrain’s ability to cost-effectively deliver high doses of drugs to precisely targeted cancers and other medical maladies without leaving behind toxic nano-clutter has been the elusive Holy Grail for scientists studying the teeny-tiny world of DNA nanotechnology.

“Most nanotechnology relies on a nanoparticle approach, and the particles are made of inorganic materials; after they’ve been used as a carrier for the drug, they’ll be left inside the body,” said the study’s lead investigator, Weihong Tan, a UF distinguished professor of chemistry, professor of physiology and functional genomics, and a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center and the UF Genetics Institute. “Compared to existing nanostructures, our nanotrain is easier and cheaper to make, is highly specific to cancer cells, has a lot of drug-loading power and is very much biocompatible.”

DNA nanotechnology holds great promise as a new way to deliver chemotherapy directly to cancer cells, but until now, scientists have not been able to direct nanotherapies to consistently differentiate cancer cells from healthy ones. Other limiting factors include high costs, too-small amounts of drugs delivered and potential toxic side effects.
Source: http://news.ufl.edu/

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston have developed a gene therapy approach that may one day stop Parkinson’s disease (PD) in it tracks, preventing disease progression and reversing its symptoms. Each year, 60,000 adults are newly diag­nosed with Parkinson’s dis­ease, a neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­order that causes a slew of symp­toms, including tremors, slowed move­ments, and changes in speech. The drugs cur­rently avail­able to treat PD patients help them regain some of the motor con­trol lost through the dis­ease, but don’t treat the under­lying cause, said Bar­bara Waszczak, a pro­fessor of phar­ma­ceu­tical sci­ences in the Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ences.

“Parkinson’s is caused by the death of dopamine neu­rons in a key motor area of the brain called the sub­stantia nigra,” said Waszczak. If you want to treat PD at its roots, she added, then you have to stop the death of these neural cells. In research reported ear­lier this week at the Exper­i­mental Biology 2013 con­fer­ence in Boston, Waszczak and grad­uate stu­dent Brendan Harmon pro­posed a treat­ment approach that does exactly that. What’s more, the method is simple and easy to use.“If we can get at it in the early stages of the dis­ease, when patients are just starting to develop symp­toms, then we might be able to stop the dis­ease from get­ting worse or at least delay the onset of severe symp­toms,” Waszczak explained.

Source: http://www.northeastern.edu/
AND
http://www.eurekalert.org/

An Indiana University School of Medicine breast cancer surgeon is pursuing research that will utilize glass, gold, nanotechnology and Greek mythology hoping to vanquish breast cancer that has metastasized to the brain. Susan E. Clare, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the IU School of Medicine, is the initiating principal investigator for a $573,000 Department of Defense grant that will allow her to explore a new approach to delivering therapy to brain metastases from primary breast cancer. As did the Greeks of old, Dr. Clare hopes to covertly deliver “warriors” to the enemy stronghold, in this case a metastatic brain tumor. Her research will explore using a cell from the body’s immune system to deliver chemotherapy directly to the brain metastases. The drug or other therapeutic is attached to the nanospheres, which are carried within the immune cell, much as soldiers were carried within the Trojan Horse. The immune cells travel in the bloodstream and release the drug when it has reached the tumor site.

“The problem for almost all drugs, and HER2-targeted drugs are no exception, is that the blood-brain barrier is a significant impediment to delivering therapies in concentrations that can be effective,” Dr. Clare said.

That biological issue caused Dr. Clare to explore other methods of delivering drugs to metastatic brain tumors. Using nanoparticles called “nanoshells,” developed by Naomi J. Halas, Ph.D., D.Sc., director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University, Dr. Clare hopes to target the brain tumors with lapatinib at a dose sufficient to shut down the signaling pathway needed for the cancer cells to proliferate.

Source: http://news.medicine.iu.edu

UCLA researchers led by Professor Dean Ho from the Jane and Jerry Weintraub Center for Reconstructive Biotechnology, have developed a potentially more effective treatment for breast cancer. Doctors have begun to categorize breast cancers into four main groups according to the genetic makeup of the cancer cells. Which category a cancer falls into generally determines the best method of treatment. But cancers in one of the four groups — called “basal-like” or “triple-negative” breast cancer (TNBC) — have been particularly tricky to treat because they usually don’t respond to the “receptor-targeted” treatments that are often effective in treating other types of breast cancer. TNBC tends to be more aggressive than the other types and more likely to recur, and can also have a higher mortality rate. Using nanodiamonds between 4 and 6 nanometers in diameter and shaped like tiny soccer balls, the researchers form clusters following drug binding that have the ability to precisely deliver cancer drugs to tumors, significantly improving the drugs’ desired effect. In the UCLA study, the nanodiamond delivery system has been able to home in on tumor masses in mice with triple negative breast cancer.

“This study demonstrates the versatility of the nanodiamond as a targeted drug-delivery agent to a tumor site,” said Ho, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCLA Department of Bioengineering. “The agent we’ve developed reduces the toxic side effects that are associated with treatment and mediates significant reductions in tumor size.”
Findings from the study are published online April 15 in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials.
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have invented a “nanosponge” capable of safely removing a broad class of dangerous toxins from the bloodstream – including toxins produced by MRSA, E. coli, poisonous snakes and bees. These nanosponges, which thus far have been studied in mice, can neutralize “pore-forming toxins,” which destroy cells by poking holes in their cell membranes. Unlike other anti-toxin platforms that need to be custom synthesized for individual toxin type, the nanosponges can absorb different pore-forming toxins regardless of their molecular structures. In a study against alpha-haemolysin toxin from MRSA, pre-innoculation with nanosponges enabled 89 percent of mice to survive lethal doses. Administering nanosponges after the lethal dose led to 44 percent survival. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection is caused by a strain of staph bacteria that’s become resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to treat ordinary staph infections.

“One of the first applications we are aiming for would be an anti-virulence treatment for MRSA. That’s why we studied one of the most virulent toxins from MRSA in our experiments,” said “Jack” Che-Ming Hu, the first author on the paper. The team, led by nanoengineers at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, published the findings in Nature Nanotechnology April 14.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Researchers at the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN) at Trinity College in Dublin – Ireland – are pursuing a new nanomaterial-based approach to neural networks that combines work in nanowires and memristors (2-terminal memory devices based on resistance switching effects). They develop a new computing paradigm that mimics the neural networks of the human brain. Both nanowires and memristors are part of the history of research into neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI). Researchers have been investigating the use of nanowires in building electronic meshes on which nerve tissues can be grown; the mesh, they hope, could link nerve cells with electronics. And almost from the time memristors were first isolated and characterized, researchers have been looking at using them in chips that would lead to artificial intelligence.
Professor John Boland, director of CRANN, and his colleagues will be using the research grant to build on their previous work. They already discovered that when electricity—or other stimuli such as chemicals or light—is applied to a random network of nanowires, it generates a chemical reactions at the junctions where the nanowires cross over each other.

This phenomenon is similar to the way the brain works, in that there are bundles of nerves that cross over one another, forming junctions. Over time, the human brain begins to learn which of these junctions is important and discards the rest.
Source: http://www.tcd.ie/

Rice University researchers have found an unexpected link between a protein that triggers the formation of blood clots and other proteins that are essential for the body’s immune system. The find could lead to new treatments for thousands of patients who suffer from inflammatory diseases and disorders that cause abnormal blood clotting.

“This link opens the door for studying severe, debilitating inflammatory disorders where the disease mechanism is still poorly understood, including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, regional ileitis and ulcerative colitis, as well as age-related macular degeneration,” said study co-author Dr. Joel Moake, a hematologist and senior research scientist in bioengineering at Rice. “There’s clinical evidence that clotting and inflammation are somehow linked in many patients, even in the absence of an infection. This linkage could help explain some of the clinical cases that have long baffled physicians.”
The research is available online in the journal PLOS ONE.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University – United Kingdom -, have been working to program a group of 40 robots, and say the ability to control robot swarms could prove hugely beneficial in a range of contexts, from military to medical.The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.The robots can also group themselves together into a single cluster after being scattered across a room, and organize themselves by order of priority. Dr Roderich Gross, head of the Natural Robotics Lab, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, says swarming robots could have important roles to play in the future of micromedicine, as ‘nanobots’ are developed for non-invasive treatment of humans.

“We are developing Artificial Intelligence to control robots in a variety of ways. The key is to work out what is the minimum amount of information needed by the robot to accomplish its task. That’s important because it means the robot may not need any memory, and possibly not even a processing unit, so this technology could work for nanoscale robots, for example in medical applications.” Dr Gross said.

Source: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/

Early diagnosis is critical in treating Lyme disease. However, nearly one quarter of Lyme disease patients are initially misdiagnosed because currently available serological tests have poor sensitivity and specificity during the early stages of infection. Misdiagnosed patients may go untreated and thus progress to late-stage Lyme disease, where they face longer and more invasive treatments, as well as persistent symptoms. A nanotechnology-inspired technique developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania may lead to diagnostics that can detect the organism itself.

An illustration of a Lyme antibody attached to a carbon nanotube
Lyme disease is an infection transmitted by the bite of ticks carrying the spiral-shaped bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. The disease was named for Lyme, Connecticut, the town where it was first diagnosed in 1975 after a puzzling outbreak of arthritis. The organism was named for its discoverer, Willy Burgdorfer. The effects of this disease can be long-term and disabling unless it is recognized and treated properly with antibiotics.

Source: http://www.upenn.edu/