New Heart, Liver, Kidney or Eye in under 2 hours: Bioprinting. By: David Russell Schilling | January 29th, 2013 By now nearly everyone has heard about “normal” 3-D printers, but 3D Bioprinters? It is seldom that one product, in and of itself, says so much about where technology and humans are headed in the future. Bioprinting technology will allow doctors and scientists to print synthetic tissue and entire human organs. This will undoubtedly be a medical revolution with all kinds of ethical issues swirling around it.
A typical inkjet printer sprays different color inks onto the flat surface of paper. The company leading the charge is Organovo, a team of biotechnology and medical device experts. A number of relatively new research concepts are converging to bring this technology to fruition: biofabrication, tissue engineering, self-assembling multicellular systems, bioink, and cell fusion to name a few. More information and research is available on Organovo’s website. David Schilling More articles from Industry Tap...
Scanadu | Sending your Smart Phone to Med School. The 5 Mega-Trends That Are Changing the Face of Health Care - Chris Rivard & Karl Rebay - Business. No matter what the Supreme Court does with Obamacare, this industry, which consumes one-fifth of the U.S. economy, is already undergoing an overhaul Reuters As the nation's highest court weighs the fate of President Obama's health care reform legislation, it's important to keep one thing in mind: No matter what the nine justices ultimately decide, significant change is coming to health care -- and the industry's future is gaining clarity.
Indeed, we see five key trends that are solid, foundational, and unassailable: (1) Strong headwinds will force change. The numbers say it all. Intense funding pressure on Medicare and Medicaid, decreasing commercial reimbursement, flat or declining volume trends, federal budget deficits, and growing uncompensated care--all of which are compelling the health care industry to adapt in a wholesale way. (2) Employer-based commercial insurance will undergo a shift. . (3) Commercial payers will alter how they do business. Let's take a closer look at each. ACOs. The personalized medicine revolution is almost here. How can big data and smart analytics tools ignite growth for your company? Find out at DataBeat, May 19-20 in San Francisco.
There are only 10 tickets left at the lowest rate! Narges Bani Asadi is a founder and CEO of Bina Technologies. We are at the dawn of a new age of personalized medicine. Just as Moore’s law transformed computing – and, as a result, all aspects of our professional and personal lives — so, too, will the interpretation of the human genome transform medicine. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, investments in molecular biology, bioinformatics, disease management and the unraveling of the human genome are all finally bearing fruit.
The urgent need for personalized medicine The need for personalized therapies abound, as a recent WSJ article emphasizes. This year, over 580,000 Americans – 1,600 people per day – are expected to die of cancer. With DNA sequencing, technology advances are happening even more rapidly. And then there’s the data question. How Big Data Is Improving Healthcare. With the increasing digitization of healthcare, the trend of "Big Data" has been gathering steam. According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm. That's predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. The report, which I've summarized in this post, does an outstanding job of profiling the leading products utilizing Big Data in healthcare.
DrBonnie360 principal Dr. Support Research - Genomics and BeyondTransform Data to InformationSupport Self-CareSupport Providers - Improve Patient CareIncrease AwarenessPool Data to Build a Better Ecosystem The report neatly outlines an "evolving ecosystem" of healthcare companies that are implementing these types of Big Data solutions. An example of the first type ("Support Research - Genomics and Beyond") is GNS Healthcare, which I profiled on ReadWriteWeb earlier this year.
Towards Personalized Medicine What About Privacy? My 2012 Digital Health Awards: Company, Person, Book Of The Year. Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years | Not Exactly Rocket Science. When scientists struggle with a problem for over a decade, few of them think, “I know! I’ll ask computer gamers to help.” That, however, is exactly what Firas Khatib from the University of Washington did. The result: he and his legion of gaming co-authors have cracked a longstanding problem in AIDS research that scientists have puzzled over for years.
It took them three weeks. Khatib’s recruits played Foldit, a programme that reframes fiendish scientific challenges as a competitive multiplayer computer game. The goal of the game is to work out the three-dimensional structures of different proteins. Last year, Cooper showed that Foldit’s gamers were better than the Rosetta programme at solving many protein structures. This year, Khatib wanted to see if the Foldit community could solve fresh problems.
Khatib’s gamers, bearing names such as Foldit Contenders Group and Foldit Void Crushers Group, had varying degrees of success in the contest. It was a success, and more would follow. Teenage Gamers Better At Simulated Surgery Than Medical Residents. Forget AP Biology and Latin class: get those pre-meds hooked on Call of Duty. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that teenage video gamers were better at simulated surgery than medical residents. The study used machines that simulated live surgical techniques, such as needle passing and suturing, and found that high schoolers who played an average of two hours of video games a day did “slightly better than our physicians in training,” said UTMB Dr. Sami Kilic (in a delightfully thick accent). “Our physicians in training have already participated in actual cases. It tells me that this computer games helps a lot to transfer the knowledge and skills gained from the computer games.”
The preliminary research corroborates a decade’s worth of evidence that playing recreational video games improves visual intelligence. Watch video of the study below: Single-Incision Surgery, Via New Robotic Systems. Tumor Snipers. CANCER SNIPERS: ImmunoGen’s Targeted Antibody Payload (TAP) technology features highly potent cytotoxic agents (yellow) attached to antibodies (blue) for targeted delivery to cancer cells.COURTESY OF IMMUNOGENThe early 1990s were not a good time to be in antibody research. Once hailed as “magic bullets,” antibodies repeatedly failed in clinical trials for cancer treatments during the ’80s, and money and interest in the sector dried up.
So when researchers at ImmunoGen, a small biotech in Waltham, Massachusetts, had the idea to use antibodies as vehicles to shuttle toxins to a tumor, they were largely ignored. “We wanted to present posters at meetings, but if we had ‘antibody’ in the title, no one would look at it,” says John Lambert, ImmunoGen’s chief scientific officer. Around the same time, a company with a similar idea opened its doors on the West Coast. Both companies, it turns out, were onto something good. Growing pains I think the hype is justified.
Armed antibodies 2.0. 4 inspiring TED videos that medical innovators must watch. This week the nonprofit TED is celebrating 1 billion video views with a series of playlists put together by celebrities like Bill Gates and Ben Affleck. The organization’s entire offering of videos contains some fascinating talks on science, medicine and running a business. Below are just four of the ones we would put on our “most inspiring” list for life science inventors and entrepreneurs. Comment or tweet your top TED talks to @medcitynews.com. Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology In this video, a biomedical animator shows some astounding digital visualizations of the complex processes happening inside the billions of cells in our bodies. Tal Golesworthy: How I repaired my own heart Born with the genetic defect called Marfan syndrome, Golesworthy faced a life-threatening problem with his aorta.
Abraham Verghese: A doctor’s touch Verghese argues that modern healthcare is losing sight of medicine’s greatest innovation: the human hand. E.O. Copyright 2014 MedCity News. Future - Health - Will mobile sensors revolutionise healthcare? How the phone in your pocket could help power a revolution in healthcare that will allow your doctor to spot problems – and intervene – no matter where you are in the world. Dr Leslie Saxon wants to be able to measure anybody’s heartbeat, no matter where they are in the world. The cardiologist, from the University of Southern California, specialises in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease using wearable and implanted devices. She believes that networked gadgets, such as an iPhone fitted with a heartrate monitor, could be the start of a revolution in healthcare that will allow your doctor to spot problems - and intervene – even if they are thousands of miles away.
She tells BBC Future about what this relatively inexpensive measure could mean for global health. One day smartphones will know your body better than you do. This is a guest post by Mark Curtis, chief client officer at design consultancy firm Fjord. Smartphones, tablets and the range of apps that run on these devices are transforming the health and lifestyle sector, and as technology continues to evolve at a lightning speed, the future landscape is a fascinating one.
Imagine a microchip in your tooth, which monitors your food intake and alerts you if you are being unhealthy; or glasses and contact lenses that act like an intuitive camcorder, recording special moments based on the emotional and physiological spikes of the wearer. Perhaps the ultimate healthcare app will monitor our body data, enabling the app to create a customised virus cocktail of medicine directly for each of us. The possibilities are many. At the heart of this digital health revolution is the smartphone; it has evolved to become an essential object of our personal mobility in nearly every facet of life. What is enabling the mobile phone to reach soulmate status? Advancing the Future of Healthcare: frog’s Connected Care Solution. By Ernest Beck - November 6, 2012 As technology disrupts established healthcare systems and the traditional patient-provider dynamic, frog introduces a prototype Connected Care Solution (CCS) that seamlessly connects doctors and patients and supportive communities.
Based on a new patient-centered healthcare paradigm, CCS fosters a collaborative relationship between the patient, providers, and a social network to improve health outcomes and help achieve lifestyle goals. With a deep knowledge and expertise in the healthcare sector, frog designers, technologists, and strategists are exploring innovative and systemic solutions for the future of healthcare—today.
Your blood pressure is spiking and you don’t know why or what to do. You forgot to take your meds. A new diet to lower cholesterol isn’t working. CCS puts the patient first. “CCS puts the patient at the center of holistically managing their healthcare situation,” says Thomas Sutton, executive creative director at frog’s Milan studio. Designer Fund And The White House Challenge You To Redesign The Electronic Medical Record. Hey designers!
You could build another app. Or you could save some lives by entering the White House’s Health Design Challenge to give the electronic medical record a much-needed redesign. Right now the thing’s an abomination — all courier font, hard to read. If you can do better, you could win $25K and get your design rolled out to 6 million VA patients and open sourced for all the world’s doctors. The Health Design Challenge is being presented by Designer Fund, a new community of philanthropic angels and mentors who support and invest in designer-founders. There’s plenty of design to be done here. So go at it. The best designs will compete for $50,000 in cash prizes. Blumenfeld’s got a tip for those participating in the challenge. He’s fired up about the project and is asking his fund’s network of over 75 world-class designers to get behind it because the Health Design Challenge “skews towards action — it’s taking it to the next level.
About Philips Design - Usability in Healthcare Design. In healthcare, the same applies to the highly complex medical equipment, such as CT scanners, defibrillators, ultrasound and x-ray systems, produced by Philips. For these products, effectiveness and safety are especially important, and there is even regulation requiring usability assessment (IEC62366). “Usability is critical for any medical device and is a key element of our product design and innovation,” says Sean Hughes, Chief Design Officer for Healthcare .
“A product may be technically excellent, but if there is a problem with how it is used or applied, its effectiveness will be impaired.” {*style:<b>Designing for evolving situations </b>*}Changes in the way that healthcare is delivered are influencing usability in healthcare design. There is an increasing range of clinicians, with varying levels of skills and training, using medical devices. The same clinician may also use more than one type of medical system or application, so in Design we have developed the . Genetic Testing for Health, Disease & Ancestry; DNA Test - 23andMe. The 'chemputer' that could print out any drug | Science | The Observer.
Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab. " Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TED conference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter. He still hopes to "create life" in the next year or two. At the same time, one branch of that thinking has itself evolved into a new project: the notion of creating downloadable chemistry, with the ultimate aim of allowing people to "print" their own pharmaceuticals at home. The idea is very much at the conception stage, but as he walks me around his labs Cronin begins to outline how that "paradigm-changing" project might progress.
What would this mean?