‘Breakthrough’ Immunotherapy Method Cures Advanced Cancer

Killer T-Cell

A breakthrough therapy to modify T-cells into potent tumor-killing agents wiped out leukemia in three patients and allowed two of them to stay cancer-free for a year, US researchers said Wednesday.

The findings are the first to show how gene transfer therapy can create specialized T-cells, which guard the body from infection, that attack cancerous tumors in advanced cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

The technique helped three elderly male patients who otherwise had little hope of survival, said the research published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine.

Further studies are needed, but the advances offer hope to people who suffer from other cancer types such as ovarian, lung, myeloma and melanoma.

"Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

"It worked much better than we thought it would."

Scientists removed a sample of the patients' T-cells and genetically modified them to attack all cells that express a certain kind of protein, CD19, which includes tumor cells.

They also engineered the T-cells to start triggering other T-cells to multiply as soon as they attached to a cancer cell, bringing on a faster death for the tumor but avoiding the side-effects of cancer drugs.

"We saw at least a 1,000-fold increase in the number of modified T-cells in each of the patients. Drugs don't do that," said June, describing the infused T-cells as "serial killers."

"On average, each infused T-cell led to the killing of thousands of tumor cells -- and overall, destroyed at least two pounds of tumor in each patient."

One patient's case, described in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a 64-year-old man whose blood and marrow were "replete with tumor cells."

He saw little change for the first two weeks after treatment, but then started experiencing nausea, chills and fever. Test showed he was undergoing a huge rise in T-cell count. By day 28, his blood showed no evidence of leukemia.

A 65-year-old patient saw similar results, with no trace of tumor after a year, but the 77-year-old patient saw a slight recurrence of cancer after he was treated with steroids. However his tumor load remains far from what it was before the treatment.

"Most of what I do is treat patients with no other options, with a very, very risky therapy with the intent to cure them," said co-principal investigator David Porter.

"This approach has the potential to do the same thing, but in a safer manner."

Bone marrow transplants are typically the only treatment for leukemia patients, but they carry a minimum 20 percent risk of dying from the procedure and cure rates hover at around 50 percent.

It remains unknown how long the treatment may keep cancer at bay.

"The doctors have found evidence that months after infusion, the new cells had multiplied and were capable of continuing their seek-and-destroy mission against cancerous cells throughout the patients' bodies," said the study.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the second most common type of adult leukemia after acute myeloid leukemia, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers intend to study similar approaches in children whose leukemia has resisted standard treatment.

They are also looking to see if the approach could target non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and acute lymphocytic leukemia, mesothelioma cancer cells, ovarian and pancreatic cancer cells.

New Drug Can Treat Almost Any Viral Infection

In the left set, rhinovirus (the common cold virus) kills untreated human cells (lower left), whereas DRACO has no toxicity in uninfected cells (upper right) and cures an infected cell population (lower right). Similarly, in the right set, dengue hemorrhagic fever virus kills untreated monkey cells (lower left), whereas DRACO has no toxicity in uninfected cells (upper right) and cures an infected cell population (lower right). MIT

A new broad-spectrum treatment for viruses could be as effective as antibiotics fighting bacteria, MIT researchers report. The method uses cells’ own defense systems to induce invaded cells to commit suicide, preventing the spread of the virus. In lab tests, the new drug completely cured mice that had been infected with influenza.

Viruses work by inserting themselves into a cell and hijacking its machinery for its own use. The invaded cell then creates more copies of the virus, which involves creating long strings of double-stranded RNA — which contains the virus’ genetic material, like DNA contains ours.

When the virus is done copying itself, its hostage cell usually dies, from the virus bursting through its walls (lysis), changes to the cell’s outer membrane, and from apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

Human cells have plenty of defenses against viral invasion, including proteins that attach to the double-stranded RNA, preventing the virus from replicating itself after successful invasion.

This new drug therapy combines those dsRNA proteins with a protein that induces apoptosis. It’s called a DRACO, Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer.

When one end of the DRACO binds to dsRNA, it signals the other end of the DRACO to induce cell suicide, an MIT News article explains. In this way, the cell is killed before the virus can take over and eventually kill it anyway. If there is no dsRNA, the healthy cells are left alone.

“In theory, it should work against all viruses,” said Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory who invented the new technology.

A handful of drugs can target specific viruses by interfering with their replication process, through addition of modified DNA building blocks or the blocking of enzymes the viruses need to stimulate the replication process. But viruses are wily bugs, and they can evolve to resist these treatments.

The DRACO therapy could be effective because it targets the host cell, not just the virus.

Rider and colleagues are testing DRACO against more viruses in mice, according to MIT. Rider hopes to license the technology for trials in larger animals and for eventual human clinical trials, too.

Source: MIT News

Bioengineered spinal disc implants to combat Back Pain

Researchers have created a biologically based spinal implant they say could someday provide relief for the millions of people suffering lower back and neck pain. Instead of removing damaged spinal discs - a surgery known as a discectomy - and fusing the vertebrate bones to stabilize the spine in patients diagnosed with severe degenerative disc disease, or herniated discs, the artificial discs could be used to replace damaged discs, performing better than current implants that are made from a combination of metal and plastic.

Although discectomies prevent pain, the often limit mobility. Human discs look something like a tire, with the outer part, called the annulus, made of a stiff material, and the inner circle, the nucleus, made of a gel-like substance that gets pressurized and bears weight.

To mimic this structure, engineers at Cornell University in Ithaca and doctors at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City engineered artificial discs out of two polymers - collagen, which wraps around the outside, and a hydrogel called alginate in the middle. They seeded the implants with cells that repopulate the structures with new tissue. Compared to artificial implants that degrade over time, the researchers found that the new implants get better as they mature in the body, due to the growth of the cells.

"Our implants have maintained 70 to 80 percent of initial disc height. In fact, the mechanical properties get better with time," says Lawrence Bonassar, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering at Cornell.

A surgical procedure approved by the FDA in 2005 for treating the degeneration of the intervertebral disc involves removing the damaged disc completely and replacing it with an implant made from a combination of metal and plastic, with the aim of mimicking the normal movement of the lumbar and the spine.

"Bone or metal or plastic implants are complicated structures which come with a mechanical risk of the structures moving around, or debris from the metal or plastic particles accumulating in the body from wear and tear," says Roger Härtl, M.D., associate professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and chief of spinal surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Because the new discs integrate and mature with the vertebrae they would have a huge advantage over traditional implants, says Härtl, who is also the neurosurgeon for the New York Giants. This major surgery would also become less invasive, safer and come with fewer long-term side effects, he adds.

Bonassar and Härtl began collaborating on the project in 2006 and have since moved into the animal testing stages. The project has received a US$325,000 grant from Switzerland's AO Spine foundation and $100,000 in support from NFL charities. The research appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Artificial Lung Created !

Researchers have created an artificial lung that uses air as a ventilating gas instead of pure oxygen - as is the case with current man-made lungs, which require heavy tanks of oxygen that limit their portability. The prototype device was built following the natural lung's design and tiny dimensions and the researchers say it has reached efficiencies akin to the genuine organ. With a volume roughly the same as a human lung, the device could be implanted into a person and even be driven by the heart.

The artificial lung is filled with breathable silicone rubber versions of the blood vessels that branch down to a diameter less than one-fourth of human hair. It was created by first building a mould with miniature features and then layering on a liquid silicone rubber that solidified into artificial capillaries and alveoli. They air and blood channels were then separated with a gas diffusion membrane.

By making the parts of the artificial lung on the same scale as the natural lung, the researchers say they were able to create a very large surface-area-to-volume ratio and shrink the distances for gas diffusion compared to the current state-of-the-art. In comparison to current artificial lung systems that require pure oxygen due to their inefficient oxygen exchange, tests of the new artificial lung using pig blood showed a three to five times improvement in oxygen exchange efficiency over current devices. It is this efficiency that enables the new artificial lung to use plain air instead of pure oxygen as the ventilating gas.

Blood is injected into the device's fluid inlet, while air is fed into the gas inlet. Oxygen molecules diffuse across the gas exchange membrane into the blood on the way to the blood outlet, while carbon dioxide in the blood fed into the device would diffuse across the membrane to be released through the air outlet.

"Based on current device performance, we estimate that a unit that could be used in humans would be about 6 inches by 6 inches by 4 inches tall, or about the volume of the human lung. In addition, the device could be driven by the heart and would not require a mechanical pump," said Joe Potkay, a research assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Case Western Reserve University.

Potkay says the device is a major step towards an easily portable and implantable artificial lung and the team envisions patients using the technology while allowing their own diseased lungs to heal, or implanting one while awaiting a lung transplant.

Potkay's team, which includes Brian Cmolik, MD, an assistant clinical professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and Michael Magnetta and Abigail Vinson, biomedical engineers and third-year students at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is now collaborating with researchers from Case Western Reserve's departments of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering to develop a coating to prevent clogging in the narrow artificial capillaries and on construction techniques needed to build a durable artificial lung large enough to test in rodent models of lung disease.

The Case Western Reserve University researchers expect to have human-scale artificial lungs in use in clinical trials within a decade.

Source: Gizmag

Newly Found Gonorrhea Superbug Resists All Existing Antibiotics

A new strain of the gonorrhea bacteria can resist all available antibiotics, doctors say. Gonorrhea is one of the world’s most common sexually transmitted diseases, so this could portend a major threat to public health.

This should actually not be surprising, because for some time now, just one class of drug has been able to successfully treat the infection.

Now researchers in Sweden and Japan identified a new variant of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bug that causes gonorrhea, that can survive that last remaining drug, the cephalosporin-class antibiotics. Researchers isolated the strain from the throat of a sex worker in Japan, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery,” said Dr. Magnus Unemo, of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, in a statement. The bacteria has been evolving to resist antibiotics since they became the standard treatment for the infection in the 1940s, during World War II.

The researchers were able to pinpoint four new genetic mutations that enable the bacteria’s resistance. Even worse, it readily passes on this resistance to other strains, increasing their resistance 500-fold, the Times says.

Gonorrhea is a particularly troubling and interesting bug. It is one of the only diseases that is unique to our species, and it’s one of the oldest known human pathogens. Earlier this year, researchers found a fragment of human DNA in the genome of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, evidence that it has adapted to its hosts quite well. The bacterium apparently picks up a genetic sequence from the host it’s infecting, according to that research, which was published in February. This may lend N. gonorrhoeae the ability to develop different strains of itself — and can explain why it has been so effective at morphing to evade antibiotics’ assaults.

The first treatments against gonorrhea used sulfonamides, but the bacteria evolved to resist it; later treatments used penicillin, which also no longer works; tetracyclines and fluoroquinolines like Cipro don’t either, the L.A. Times notes.

It’s too early to tell whether this new super-STD is already spreading, but it’s likely to do so unless new therapies are developed, Unemo said.

Gonorrhea impacts about 700,000 Americans every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If untreated, it can lead to serious health complications in both genders, the CDC says. It can lead to infertility in women and especially men, and it increases the risk of transmitting other STDs, like HIV. Babies born to infected mothers are at high risk of developing serious infections and blindness. About 3 to 4 percent of the time, it can spread to the skin, blood, heart and joints in infected adults.

The report on this new strain was presented Sunday at a Quebec City meeting of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research. Just last Thursday, the CDC reported growing numbers of gonorrhea infections that require unusually high doses of cephalosporins to cure them, the LA Times said. For now, treatment should include cephalosporins and the antibiotic azithromycin, while the CDC and National Institutes of Health work on new drugs.

Source: Popsci via Eurekalert

Scientists turn 'bad fat' into 'good fat'

Scientists say they have found a way to turn body fat into a better type of fat that burns off calories and weight.

The US Johns Hopkins team made the breakthrough in rats but believe the same could be done in humans, offering the hope of a new way to treat obesity.

Modifying the expression of a protein linked to appetite not only reduced the animals' calorie intake and weight, but also transformed their fat composition.

"Bad" white fat became "good" brown fat, Cell Metabolism journal reports.


Brown fat is abundant in babies, which they use as a power source to generate body heat, expending calories at the same time.

But as we age our brown fat largely disappears and gets replaced by "bad" white fat, which typically sits as a spare tyre around the waist.

Experts have reasoned that stimulating the body to make more brown fat rather than white fat could be a helpful way to control weight and prevent obesity and its related health problems like type 2 diabetes.

Novel approach


Various teams have been searching for a way to do this, and Dr Sheng Bi and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine believe they may have cracked it.

They designed an experiment to see if suppressing an appetite-stimulating protein called NPY would decrease body weight in rats.

When they silenced NPY in the brains of the rodents they found their appetite and food intake decreased.

Even when the rats were fed a very rich, high-fat diet they still managed to keep more weight off than rats who had fully functioning NPY.

The scientists then checked the fat composition of the rats and found an interesting change had occurred.

In the rats with silenced NPY expression, some of the bad white fat had been replaced with good brown fat.

The researchers are hopeful that it may be possible to achieve the same effect in people by injecting brown fat stem cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weight loss.

Dr Bi said: "If we could get the human body to turn bad fat into good fat that burns calories instead of storing them, we could add a serious new tool to tackle the obesity epidemic.

"Only future research will tell us if that is possible."

Dr Jeremy Tomlinson, an expert at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Obesity Research, said: "This is exciting, novel and interesting.

"We will need a lot more work to tease this out, but it could offer a feasible way to develop new treatments for obesity."
Source: BBC

Nasal spray vaccine could prevent type 1 diabetes

A nasal spray vaccine currently being trialed in Australia could prevent the development of type 1 diabetes. Previous research showed that the nasal vaccine was successful in preventing the disease in mice, and now the results of a study involving 52 adults with early type 1 diabetes has provided encouraging evidence that it could also be effective in preventing the disease humans.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's immune system attacks and kills the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. The subsequent lack of insulin leads to increased blood and urine glucose, which can result in heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness and premature death if left untreated, with the most common treatment being the daily injection of insulin.

Although the 52 participants in the study had early type 1 diabetes and had evidence of immunity to insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, they were not yet at the stage of requiring insulin injections. For the study, the participants were given either the nasal vaccine or a placebo for 12 months.

When administered through the nasal passages, the insulin vaccine stimulates the immune system present in the mucosal linings and works to desensitize the whole immune system to insulin so that the immune system's white blood cells are prevented from attacking insulin in the beta cells.

"The results showed that the vaccine allowed the immune system to restore immune tolerance to insulin," said Professor Len Harrison of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. "When subsequently given insulin by injection, the participants who had received the nasal insulin vaccine were found to be desensitized to insulin."

The researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the Royal Melbourne Hospital say the results of the study indicate they are on the right track to finding a vaccine for type 1 diabetes and the same approach could also be adapted to other autoimmune diseases.

"The nasal vaccine approach, if shown to be successful in human type 1 diabetes, could also be tested with different vaccines for the prevention of other autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis," added Professor Harrison.

The Type 1 Diabetes Prevention Trial, which was previously known as the intranasal insulin trial, INIT II), began in 2006 and is now halfway through the testing phase. Following the encouraging results of the study, hopes are high a nasal vaccine for type 1 diabetes could be available in as little as two years.

Details of the research was published in the April 2011 issue of the journal Diabetes.

Cool Your Brain For Better Sleep

You can't sleep.  You've tried counting sheep, drinking warm milk, maybe even taking medications like Benadryl or sleeping pills.

Maybe next you should try cooling your brain.



According to research presented Monday at Sleep 2011, the annual meeting of the Associated Profession Sleep Societies, cooling the brain and can reduce the amount of time it takes people with insomnia to fall asleep -- and increase the length of time they stay that way.

To achieve "frontal cerebral thermal transfer," as the cooling is called, researchers Dr. Eric Nofzinger and Dr. Daniel Buysse of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine outfitted 24 people --  12 with insomnia, and 12 without -- with soft plastic caps.  The caps had tubes for circulating water at neutral, moderate or maximum "cooling intensity."

The team observed how well participants slept with and without the caps, and at the different temperature levels.  Patients with insomnia who were treated at maximum cooling intensity for the whole night took about 13 minutes to fall asleep and slept 89% of the time that they were in bed, the researchers said.  That's similar to the sleep enjoyed by healthy study subjects who didn't have insomnia (who took 16 minutes to fall asleep and also slept 89% of the time).

The method is effective because it slows metabolism in the frontal cortex, according to the presenters.  Insomnia is associated with increased metabolism in that part of the brain; reduced metabolism, apparently, has the opposite effect.

In a press release, Nofzinger noted that only 25 percent of patients on sleeping pills said they were satisfied with the drugs, which can cause side effects and dependence.  The cooling caps may provide an effective, safe and natural alternative.  "We believe this has far-reaching implications for how insomnia can be managed in the future," he said.
Source: LA Times

Researchers Build the First Living Laser, Using Human Cells and Jellyfish Protein

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital built a living laser partly to study interactions between electronic and biological systems, and partly out of sheer curiosity. The world’s first biological laser, made from a single living cell, could lead to better microscope imaging inside the body and even targeted light therapies, researchers say.

A single human cell engineered to express green fluorescent protein can be used to amplify photons into super-short pulses of laser light, the researchers say.

Lasers consist of a gain medium, the source of optical gain within the laser which absorbs external energy and excites atoms or molecules into a more energized state, inside an optical cavity. Most lasers use semiconductors, crystals or gases as a gain medium. In this case, the researchers used green fluorescent protein (GFP).

First, the researchers filled an inch-long cylinder with a GFP solution, and placed mirrors at each end. They pulsed it with light and confirmed the GFP solution could amplify the input energy into short pulses of laser emissions, according to anews release from Mass. General. This proved GFP could serve as the laser’s gain medium. Green fluorescent protein, isolated from jellyfish, will emit green light when it is exposed to blue light.

Then the team engineered human embryonic kidney cells to produce GFP, and placed a single cell between two mirrors, just 20 micrometers apart. The researchers flooded the cell with blue light, and the cell lit up. The mirrors served as the optical cavity, allowing light to bounce through the cell many times, amplifying it into a coherent green beam that was visible to the naked eye.

Living Laser Schematic: When a single biological cell genetically programmed to produce green fluorescent protein is placed inside an optical resonator consisting of two parallel mirrors separated by 20 µm (0.02 mm), the cell can generate green laser light.  Nature Photonics/Malte Gather, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

The cell’s spherical shape acted as a lens, refocusing the light and therefore requiring less energy for lasing than was necessary in the cylinder experiment. Best of all, the cells survived the lasing process, and were able to produce hundreds of pulses of laser light.

A living laser could have a wide range of medical uses, according to lead author Malte Gather at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Mass. General. They could be used to activate drugs using light, for instance, or for new forms of imaging — it is difficult for visible and UV light to penetrate very far inside the body. Eventually, living lasers could enable optical communications and computing inside the body, using living systems instead of electronics.

Sourcs: Popsci,Eurekalert, BBC

Preventing Heart Attack Using Magnetic fields

Overly-viscous blood can damage blood vessels and lead to heart attacks. Therefore, people who are at risk of heart attacks take medications such as Aspirin, in order to thin their blood. Such drugs can have unpleasant side effects, however, and can only be taken a certain number of times per day. Prof. Rongjia Tao, a physicist from Philadelphia's Temple University, now thinks he might have come up with a better way of thinning human blood - he subjects it to magnetic fields.

Tao had previously researched the use of magnetism for decreasing the viscosity of oil in engines and pipelines. Because blood contains iron, it turns out that it, too, becomes more fluid when magnetized.

In lab tests, Tao and Temple collaborator Ke "Colin" Huang subjected human blood samples to a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to an MRI) for approximately one minute. This polarized the red blood cells, which caused them to link together into short chains. These chains, because they are larger than single cells, tend to flow down the middle of blood vessels, instead of creating friction by moving against the inner walls. All told, he was able to decrease the viscosity of the samples by 20 to 30 percent.

The blood did return to its original viscosity once the magnetic field was removed, although it took several hours to do so. It is apparently safe to repeat the treatment over and over, however, as the function of the red blood cells does not appear to be affected.

"By selecting a suitable magnetic field strength and pulse duration, we will be able to control the size of the aggregated red-cell chains, hence to control the blood's viscosity," said Tao. "This method of magneto-rheology provides an effective way to control the blood viscosity within a selected range."

More work is required, although Tao hopes to ultimately make the treatment available as a preventative therapy.

The research is being published in the journal Physical Review E.

Source: Gizmag

Detecting and controlling seizures with brain implants

In the future, people who are prone to seizures may get an array of electrodes implanted in their brains. These electrodes would be capable of detecting the onset of a seizure, and then releasing medication to prevent it from happening. While it might sound far-fetched, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have already demonstrated the technology on lab rats.

Multielectrode arrays (MEAs) are capable of recording or controlling the electrical activity in neurons, and are used in devices such as ear implants and pacemakers. The Pittsburgh team coated MEAs with the polymer Polypyrrole (PPy), which is known for its electrical conductivity. Mixed in with the PPy were anti-convulsive neurochemicals.

The coated MEAs were then placed on a rat's brain, and electrically stimulated. This caused the neurochemicals to dissociate from the PPy, and diffuse into the adjacent regions of the brain. Testing indicated that after dissociation, the drugs still remained effective.

Similar technologies have involved implants with built-in drug reservoirs, although these would be larger than the coated MEAs, and could cause tissue damage.

"By directly loading a drug of interest onto an individual electrode site and using an electrical signal to trigger its release, we can precisely control the drug delivery site with ease," said the study's co-author, Prof. X Tracy Cui. "Additionally, our technology can be used for a combination of exogenous chemicals such as subtype-specific receptor antagonists, thus potentially allowing for more precise dissection of neural circuit function at the molecular level."

The research was published this week in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Source: Gizmag

Nanofiber patch could regenerate dead areas of heart

When someone has a heart attack, the cells in the affected area of the heart die off, and the damage can't be repaired. In the not-so-distant future, however, that may not be the case. Engineers from Rhode Island's Brown University, working with colleagues in India, have created a carbon nanofiber patch that has been shown to regenerate heart cells. It is hoped that such patches could eventually be placed on the heart, like a Band-Aid, to regrow dead areas.

The patch itself is 22 millimeters long, 15 microns thick, has a scaffold-like structure, and can expand and contract like heart tissue. It is made from a government-approved polymer and carbon nanofibers. The fibers are said to be excellent conductors of electrons, and so are able to transmit the electrical impulses that the heart uses in order to maintain a steady beat.

The Brown team laid the patch on a glass substrate, then seeded its nanofibers with heart cells known as cardiomyocytes. After four hours, five times as many cells had colonized the nanofiber patch, than a control patch that consisted of the polymer only. This figure rose to six times the cell density, after five days. Additionally, after four days, the density of neurons on the nanofiber patch had doubled.

According to the engineers, the elasticity of the scaffolding and the electrical qualities of the nanofibers are what makes it such an ideal spawning ground for the cardiomyocytes and neurons.

There is still work to be done, however. The team now wants to alter the pattern of the scaffolding in order to better mimic the heart's electrical current, along with placing a patch in a live subject to see how it handles the heart's voltage and beat regime. They also want to confirm that the cardiomyocytes which grow on the patch are able to function in the same ways as regular heart cells.

The research, which was conducted in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, was recently published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

Source: Gizmag

Paralyzed man regains voluntary leg movement with electrode array implant

In a move that gives cautious hope to the millions of people suffering some form of paralysis, a team of researchers from UCLA, Caltech and the University of Louisville has given a man rendered paralyzed from the chest down after a hit-and-run accident in 2006 the ability to stand and take his first tentative steps in four years. The team used a stimulating electrode array implanted into the man's body to provide continual direct electrical stimulation to the lower part of the spinal cord that controls movement of the hips, knees, ankles and toes, to mimic the signals the brain usually sends to initiate movement.



Instead of bypassing the nervous system to directly stimulate the leg muscles, the electrical signals provided by the array stimulate the spinal cord's own neural network so it can use the sensory input derived from the legs to direct muscle and joint movements. The stimulation therefore doesn't induce movement, but taps into a network of spinal cord nerves that are capable of initiating movement on their own without the help of the brain, which then work together with cues from the legs to direct muscle movement.


The research team's work builds on previous research at UCLA that showed animals with spinal-cord injuries could stand, balance, bear weight and take coordinated steps while the outermost part of the spinal canal - or epidural space - is stimulated.

Thanks to the breakthrough the test subject, 25 year old Rob Summers, is able to supply the muscular push required to stand up and remain standing for up to four minutes at a time. With periodic assistance, Summers is able to stand for up to an hour, and with the aid of a harness support and some assistance from a therapist he is able to take steps on a treadmill.

Prior to implantation with the epidural stimulating array, Summers, who suffered a complete motor injury at the C7/T1 level of the spinal cord, was unable to move even his toes. But after implantation he was able to not only stand and make repeated stepping motions on a treadmill with the assistance of a harness, but also regained the ability to voluntarily move his toes, ankles, knees, and hips on command. However, once the stimulation is turned off, Summers loses the voluntary control of his limbs.

Over time, Summers also experienced improvements in several types of autonomic function, including bladder and bowel control and temperature regulation. The researchers say these autonomic functions began to return before there was any sign of voluntary movement, which took around seven months after he began receiving epidural stimulation to emerge.

Although the researchers still aren't yet fully sure how these autonomic functions were regained, the results indicate the treatment could help improve the quality of life of spinal cord injury sufferers other than those with the strength to undergo the rigorous physical training Summers did as part of his treatment. The researchers say the relief from secondary complications of complete spinal cord injury - including impairment or loss of bladder control, sphincter control and sexual response - could even prove to be ultimately as, or more important in terms of improving the quality of life of such patients.

While obviously encouraged by the results, the researchers are quick to point out that the study represents just one case and that there's no way to tell how other patients may react. They also point out that Summers, who was an athlete in comparatively excellent physical condition before his accident, retained some sensation in his lower extremities after his injury indicating his spinal cord was not completely severed, which may have played a part in the level of success he was able to attain.

However, the researchers are hopeful that their work could one day provide some individuals suffering spinal cord injuries with the ability to stand independently, maintain balance and take effective steps through the use of a portable stimulation unit and the assistance of a walker. Additionally, the researchers believe the approach could potentially also help in the treatment of stroke, Parkinson's, and other disorders affecting motor function.

The team has received approval from the FDA to test five spinal-cord injury patients and will next try and replicate their initial results with a patient that matches Summers in terms of age, injury, and physical ability. They will then turn to patients who have no sensation to see how that influences the outcome.

Interestingly, the device implanted into Summers is FDA-approved for back pain only and its use was meant only as a test to see if the researcher's concepts would work. As a result, the researchers say the current implants have many limitations and that further advances in the technology should lead to better control of the standing and stepping process. They are also looking at whether it might be possible to move the array higher up on the spinal column to see if it could also be used to affect the arms and hands.

The UCLA, Caltech and University of Louisville researcher's work is detailed in the paper, "Epidural stimulation of the lumbosacral spinal cord enables voluntary movement, standing, and assisted stepping in a paraplegic human," which is published in The Lancet.

Source: Gizmag