medicine

Scientists at MIT say they've developed a promising new drug that appears to not only be able to attack the common cold, but just about any other virus as well.

The drug goes by the name DRACO (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer--uh, I'll stick with the acronym) and is made using the defense mechanism of living cells. The drug reportedly attacks cells that have been infected with a virus, without harming healthy cells. DRACO attaches itself to virus-tainted cells and contains a protein that initiates a process by which the infected cells kill themselves. If DRACO encounters a … Read more

New technology out of Georgia Tech may reduce the number of pills people with multiple prescriptions need to take every day--or that Ray Kurzweil takes to try and live long enough to become immortal. That's because researchers have developed a new gelcap with multiple compartments that can be used to take different drugs at the same time.

Right now the hydrogel capsules are very tiny--just one micron across--and no one's actually tried to fill one with medication yet. But the researchers say a meta-pill could have significant advantages, like being able to suppress resistance to certain drugs by co-mingling them with medications that counter adverse effects. The one-shot capsules could also afford more precise control over dosages, and, of course, could mean less time spent organizing pills.

What's cool about the multi-compartment pills is that they can deliver two very different kind of drugs at the same time--those that can dissolve in water, and those that are hydrophobic, or generally repelled by water (think of how cooking oil refuses to mix with water). This is done by inserting microscopic polymer chains in the pill. The hydrophobic drugs are trapped within nanoparticles assembled from the polymer chains.… Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Experts in fields such as regenerative medicine; personalized health; information and data-driven health; and neuromedicine are gathering here this week for several days of discussions about the future of medicine.

Organized under the appropriate rubric of "FutureMed," leaders in these fields, plus nearly 70 paying participants, are taking part in Singularity University's first FutureMed executive program.

For two years, Singularity University (SU)--created by futurist Ray Kurzweil and X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis--has been bringing people together at NASA Ames Research Center here to discuss what are called "exponentially growing" technologies--things … Read more

The Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect has been put to its most imaginative use yet, and it's no game: saving lives. Surgeons and scientists are using the motion-sensing game controller in medical procedures and research, helping surgeons to operate and blind people to see.

The sawbones at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital are firing up the Kinect in the operating theater. No, they're not playing "Operation" while waiting for the anesthetic to kick in, but actually using it to view and manipulate medical imaging.

Read more of "Microsoft Kinect scrubs in to help surgeons operate and the blind see&… Read more

Your doctor may still be human, but your pharmacist may soon go cybernetic. A robotic drug dispensary system at the University of California, San Francisco is spitting out oral and injected medications for all kinds of patients.

Getting the wrong medication is the greatest risk facing patients under traditional pharmacy systems, according to UCSF Medical Center CEO Mark Laret. But the automated system has prepared some 350,000 doses without a single error, the institution says.

The room-size robots store drugs in dozens of small boxes in a sterile environment. After the 12-hour prescription is received as a digital file, a robot arm finds the correct labeled drug, prepares the proper dose in bar-coded plastic bags on a ring and spits them out into a large bin.

Nurses will begin scanning the bar codes at patient bedsides this year to confirm the doses are correct. Doctors, meanwhile, will begin inputting prescriptions directly into computers next year.

Three of the robots are Robotic IV Automation (RIVA) systems, made by Canada's Intelligent Hospital Systems. They also prepare hazardous chemotherapy drugs. … Read more

OAKLAND, Calif.--Robotics are already helping doctors perform surgery, but special robotic limbs could someday soon be assisting those who can't walk or those who can't lift. At a demonstration day put on Thursday by Kaiser Permanente, the health care giant gathered about 100 physicians and health care professionals to check out, and give feedback on, future technologies being evaluated for rollout.

Kaiser Permanente, a private nonprofit organization, held the event at its Garfield Health Care Innovation Center in Oakland, Calif. Questions to the organizers and administrators about the financial aspects of the new technologies on display were … Read more

A good appointment system is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle when it comes to keeping a busy medical practice running smoothly. Medical Calendar is a basic program that lets users keep track of appointments for multiple providers within a practice. It's not the most sophisticated or full-featured program we've seen, but it does work well for what it is.

The program's interface is attractive and fairly easy to navigate. We liked that users could enter multiple medical providers and choose from a variety of avatars, making them easy to identify at a glance. … Read more

Scientists at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. and IBM Research in Zurich say they are the first to use atomic-force microscopy to "see" the unknown molecular structure of a marine compound taken from the deepest place on Earth, a result that could speed up the development of new medicines.

In doing so, researchers discovered that the pressure-tolerant bacterium sampled from the deepest place on the planet--the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, 35,814 feet below sea level--contains the molecular structure cephalandole A, which was originally isolated from a Taiwanese orchid.

The group's findings appear online August 1 … Read more

Bioengineered organs, still largely the stuff of sci-fi, may have just moved a step closer to reality with reports that scientists have successfully implanted lab-made lung tissue into living rats.

The fully functional tissue can exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, the key role of the lungs.

The scientists--led by a team at Yale University--used a chemical treatment to remove all existing cells from adult rat lungs, keeping the structure of the airways and vascular system intact to later serve as a sort of "scaffold" for the growth of new lung cells.

They then cultured a combination of lung cells using a bioreactor designed to mimic the fetal lung environment and repopulated the "decellularized" rat lung with the engineered cells. When implanted into rats for short intervals of 45 to 120 minutes, the new tissue exchanged gas in a manner similar to that of natural lungs.

The scientists, who detail their work in a Thursday issue of the journal Science, acknowledge that it may be some time before scientists can generate fully functional lungs in vitro, but they nonetheless are touting their research as a promising development in the quest to regenerate lung tissue.

"This is an early step in the regeneration of entire lungs for larger animals and, eventually, for humans," said Laura Niklason, a Yale professor and vice chair of the Departments of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering and lead author of the study, which was funded by Yale and the National Institutes of Health. (Decellularization has also been used in experiments to rebuild a human heart). … Read more