THE TECH-LICIOUS: MEDICAL

Now, Check Your Blood Sugar Levels Using A Smartphone

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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;">Scientists from Polytechnique Montreal and Gorilla Glass manufacturer Corning have developed a new display sensor for smartphones that can allow a user to check his/her blood sugar levels (if diabetic), assess body temperature, and even analyze DNA. The sensors can be embedded within the smartphone's display. It can work with platforms such as Apple's HomeKit in order to provide more information about one's health.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;">Also, the researchers have developed their first laser-written light-guiding systems that could initiate these advancements. The systems can shot lasers into glass to create pathways that transmit data in the form of small beams of light. On the other hand, the waveguides act as a tunnel that channel light.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;">The scientist said that the approach created by the team is nearly 10 times better at minimizing loss compared to previous ones made with lasers. These sensors could be embedded in biomedical sensors into tablets and window pc's as well. They also added that the technology could also be used to add security to mobile devices and monitor carbon-monoxide levels in the air as well.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;">Paper co-author Raman Kashyap, a professor of electrical engineering and engineering physics at Polytechnique Montreal, said in a statement, "We're opening the Pandora's box at the moment." Now that the technique is viable, "it's up to people to invent new uses" for it, he added.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 25px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">SOURCE-<a href="http://www.gizmodo.in/indiamodo/Now-Check-Your-Blood-Sugar-Levels-Using-A-Smartphone/articleshow/38852479.cms" target="_blank">GIZNET</a></span></span></div>

Now, Check Your Blood Sugar Levels Using A Smartphone

Scientists from Polytechnique Montreal and Gorilla Glass manufacturer Corning have developed a new display sensor for smartphones that can allow a user to check his/her blood sugar levels (if diabeti…

22 Jul 2014

Put Down Your Syringe, Nanoparticles May One Day Deliver Drugs

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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A special class of tiny gold particles can easily slip through cell membranes, making them good candidates to deliver drugs directly to target cells.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A new study from MIT materials scientists reveals that these nanoparticles enter cells by taking advantage of a route normally used in vesicle-vesicle fusion, a crucial process that allows signal transmission between neurons. In the July 21 issue of<em>Nature Communications</em>, the researchers describe in detail the mechanism by which these nanoparticles are able to fuse with a membrane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The findings suggest possible strategies for designing nanoparticles — made from gold or other materials — that could get into cells even more easily.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“We’ve identified a type of mechanism that might be more prevalent than is currently known,” says Reid Van Lehn, an MIT graduate student in materials science and engineering and one of the paper’s lead authors. “By identifying this pathway for the first time it also suggests not only how to engineer this particular class of nanoparticles, but that this pathway might be active in other systems as well.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The paper’s other lead author is Maria Ricci of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The research team, led by Alfredo Alexander-Katz, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, and Francesco Stellacci from EPFL, also included scientists from the Carlos Besta Institute of Neurology in Italy and Durham University in the United Kingdom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Most nanoparticles enter cells through endocytosis, a process that traps the particles in intracellular compartments, which can damage the cell membrane and cause cell contents to leak out. However, in 2008, Stellacci, who was then at MIT, and Darrell Irvine, a professor of materials science and engineering and of biological engineering, found that a special class of gold nanoparticles coated with a mix of molecules could enter cells without any disruption.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“Why this was happening, or how this was happening, was a complete mystery,” Van Lehn says.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Last year, Alexander-Katz, Van Lehn, Stellacci, and others discovered that the particles were somehow <a href="http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/the-gold-standard-for-cell-penetration-0823" style="color: #003366; text-decoration: none;">fusing with cell membranes</a> and being absorbed into the cells. In their new study, they created detailed atomistic simulations to model how this happens, and performed experiments that confirmed the model’s predictions.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Stealth Entry</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Gold nanoparticles used for drug delivery are usually coated with a thin layer of molecules that help tune their chemical properties. Some of these molecules, or ligands, are negatively charged and hydrophilic, while the rest are hydrophobic. The researchers found that the particles’ ability to enter cells depends on interactions between hydrophobic ligands and lipids found in the cell membrane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Cell membranes consist of a double layer of phospholipid molecules, which have hydrophobic lipid tails and hydrophilic heads. The lipid tails face in toward each other, while the hydrophilic heads face out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In their computer simulations, the researchers first created what they call a “perfect bilayer,” in which all of the lipid tails stay in place within the membrane. Under these conditions, the researchers found that the gold nanoparticles could not fuse with the cell membrane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">However, if the model membrane includes a “defect” — an opening through which lipid tails can slip out — nanoparticles begin to enter the membrane. When these lipid protrusions occur, the lipids and particles cling to each other because they are both hydrophobic, and the particles are engulfed by the membrane without damaging it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In real cell membranes, these protrusions occur randomly, especially near sites where proteins are embedded in the membrane. They also occur more often in curved sections of membrane, because it’s harder for the hydrophilic heads to fully cover a curved area than a flat one, leaving gaps for the lipid tails to protrude.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“It’s a packing problem,” Alexander-Katz says. “There’s open space where tails can come out, and there will be water contact. It just makes it 100 times more probable to have one of these protrusions come out in highly curved regions of the membrane.”</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Mimicking Nature</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This phenomenon appears to mimic a process that occurs naturally in cells — the fusion of vesicles with the cell membrane. Vesicles are small spheres of membrane-like material that carry cargo such as neurotransmitters or hormones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The similarity between absorption of vesicles and nanoparticle entry suggests that cells where a lot of vesicle fusion naturally occurs could be good targets for drug delivery by gold nanoparticles. The researchers plan to further analyze how the composition of the membranes and the proteins embedded in them influence the absorption process in different cell types. “We want to really understand all the constraints and determine how we can best design nanoparticles to target particular cell types, or regions of a cell,” Van Lehn says.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“One could use the results from this paper to think about how to leverage these findings into improved nanoparticle delivery vehicles — for instance, perhaps new surface ligands for nanoparticles could be engineered to have improved affinity for both surface groups and lipid tails,” says Catherine Murphy, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the study.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">SOURCE-<a href="http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/8093/Put-Down-Your-Syringe-Nanoparticles-May-One-Day-Deliver-Drugs.aspx" target="_blank">DESIGNER EDGE</a></span></div>
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Put Down Your Syringe, Nanoparticles May One Day Deliver Drugs

A special class of tiny gold particles can easily slip through cell membranes, making them good candidates to deliver drugs directly to target cells. A new study from MIT materials scientists reveals…

22 Jul 2014

Corneas regrown using human stem cells

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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><img alt="Researchers regrow corneas using human stem cells (Photo: Shutterstock)" height="358" src="http://images.gizmag.com/hero/cornea-stem-cells.jpg" title="Researchers regrow corneas using human stem cells (Photo: Shutterstock)" width="640" /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Medical researchers working with human stem cells have discovered a 
way to improve regrowth of corneal tissue in the human eye. Using a 
molecule known as ABCB5 to act as an identifying marker for rare limbal 
stem cells, the researchers were able to use antibodies to detect ABCB5 
on stem cells in tissue from donated human eyes and use them to regrow 
anatomically correct, fully functional human corneas in mice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Limbal stem cells are found in the eye’s basal limbal epithelium (the
 border between the cornea and the white of the eye) and assist in the 
proper maintenance and regeneration of corneal tissue. However, if these
 cells are damaged or lost because of injury or disease in the eye, 
blindness results.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Up until now, the use of tissue or cell transplants to help the 
cornea regenerate have been used, but as it was both unknown whether 
there were actual limbal stem cells in the grafts, or how many, the 
outcomes were generally inconsistent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">As a result of this recent research, transplants have now been made 
in mice using human ABCB5-positive limbal stem cells that resulted in 
the restoration and long-term maintenance of normal, transparent 
corneas. Control mice that received either no cells or ABCB5-negative 
cells failed to have their cornea restored.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"Limbal stem cells are very rare, and successful transplants are 
dependent on these rare cells," said Bruce Ksander, Ph.D., of 
Massachusetts Eye and Ear, co-lead author on the research. "This finding
 will now make it much easier to restore the corneal surface. It’s a 
very good example of basic research moving quickly to a translational 
application."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The research was recently published in the journal <i><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13426.html" target="_blank">Nature </a></i> as one of the first known examples of constructing tissue from an adult-derived human stem cell.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">SOURCE-<a href="http://www.gizmag.com/corneas-regrown-human-stem-cells/32803/" target="_blank">GIZMAG</a></span></div>

Corneas regrown using human stem cells

Medical researchers working with human stem cells have discovered a way to improve regrowth of corneal tissue in the human eye. Using a molecule known as ABCB5 to act as an identifying marker for r…

06 Jul 2014