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.

Genes Can Now Be Patented, But the Future of Gene Research Remains Unclear

BRCA1

In a victory for biotechnology companies, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that human genes can be patented. Odds are pretty good the case will make its way to the Supreme Court, and it’s possible the justices will rule the other way, so this is not a done deal — but until then, it seems companies can own the exclusive right to use human genes.

The case involved patents on two human genes that are used to predict breast cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2. To study these genes, patients and scientists will again have to pay a fee — up to $3,000 — to the company that owns the patent, Myriad Genetics.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent law, overturned an earlier decision that invalidated the patents. The decision is still somewhat unclear, however, with three separate opinions and a half-dozen points of law under debate. The lack of clarity, and the complex and controversial nature of the case, makes a hearing by the high court seem likely.

The court did rule against Myriad in one aspect, involving the process they use to analyze a patient’s genes. This requires “abstract mental steps,” the court said. So the court said the genes themselves could be patented, but a specific method of studying them could not.

"We strongly support the Court's decision that isolated DNA and cDNA are patent-eligible material as both are new chemical matter with important utilities which can only exist as the product of human ingenuity," said Peter Meldrum, president and CEO of Myriad Genetics. Scientists were not as pleased: "Genes or a sequence of the genome is a product of nature and should not be patentable," said Dr. Timothy J. O'Leary, president of the Association for Molecular Pathology, which brought the lawsuit.

The U.S. Trademark and Patent Office has already issued patents on more than 4,000 human genes, so a ruling that would invalidate gene patents would have major implications for the biotech industry. Companies like Myriad argue patents are necessary to protect product development and encourage innovation; opponents argue the ruling will stifle competitive research and jeopardize patient health, and that it’s unethical to patent something that comes from nature. The Obama administration had filed a brief arguing that isolated genes should not be patented.

Patents on plant and even animal genes have not risen to this level of controversy. Genetically altered plants and animals are big business for biotech firms, which license their gene patents to other companies that produce seeds, additives and other products. About 20 percent of the human genome is also patented, including genes associated with diseases like Alzheimer's. Other companies and researchers must pay fees to license the patent.

The court ruled that patents are allowed because once pieces of DNA are isolated from the body, their chemical structures differ from the DNA that exists inside the body — so they’re not actually products of nature. Two of the judges on the three-judge appellate panel are scientists, and brought their own analysis to the debate. Judge Alan D. Lourie, who as the Atlantic points out holds a PhD in chemistry, concluded thusly:

In this case, the claimed isolated DNA molecules do not exist as in nature within a physical mixture to be purified. They have to be chemically cleaved from their chemical combination with other genetic materials. In other words, in nature, isolated DNAs are covalently bonded to such other materials. Thus, when cleaved, an isolated DNA molecule is not a purified form of a natural material, but a distinct chemical entity. In fact, some forms of isolated DNA require no purification at all, because DNAs can be chemically synthesized directly as isolated molecules.

Judge Kimberly A. Moore, who has a degree in electrical engineering, also discussed the chemical makeup of the isolated DNA, but also said the new sequences have a utility that whole gene sequences do not — in this case, predicting breast cancer risk.

Judge William C. Bryson, who does not list any scientific background on his bio, was the sole dissenter, arguing that most people would argue patents are intended to protect inventions, and “a human gene is not an invention.”

Much legal wrangling remains to be done before this question is finally settled.

[Popsci via New York Times, The Atlantic]

World's Smallest Battery Yet is About as Thick as a Human Hair

Nanotechnology promises to enable tiny, intricate circuits powering devices on any surface. But unless they’re harvesting energy from something like a heartbeat, the devices can only be as small as the smallest battery.

Now researchers at Rice University have combined the two, packing an entire lithium-ion battery into a single nanowire. The developers say it’s as small as such a device can possibly get.

Researchers led by Rice professor Pulickel Ajayan built a hybrid energy storage device, which serves as a battery and a supercapacitor. The first version sandwiched an electrolyte between a nickel/tin anode and a cathode made of a polymer called polyaniline. The cathode also served as a supercapacitor, storing lithium ions in bulk, as this writeup by Rice University explains. The prototype proved that lithium ions would move through the electrolyte and into the cathode.

Then Ajayan and colleagues incorporated this structure into a single nanowire, through a complicated process of etching and chemical washing. The goal is to make nanowires with ultra-thin separation between electrodes, so the device can remain as small as possible.

The completed wire-batteries are about 50 microns tall, which is roughly the diameter of a human hair, according to Rice.

For now, they can only charge and discharge about 20 times before they die, but researchers are trying to optimize them to last longer. The research is published in the journal ACS Nano Letters.

[Popsci via PhysOrg]

3D Displays Does Cause 'visual discomfort'

No, it's not just you. According to studies recently conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, the viewing of stereoscopic 3D displays does indeed cause visual discomfort, fatigue and headaches. The problem appears to come from the fact that the viewers' eyes are simultaneously trying to focus on the screen, and on objects that appear to be located either in front of or behind that screen.

The studies involved 24 adult subjects, who viewed 3D content both on small, consumer electronics-style screens, and on larger, theater-style screens. With the smaller screens, which are viewed at a closer distance, content that appeared to be located in front of the screen caused the most discomfort. Interestingly, however, viewing of the larger, more distant screens was most uncomfortable when content appeared to be located behind the screen.

"When watching stereo 3D displays, the eyes must focus - that is, accommodate - to the distance of the screen because that's where the light comes from," said Martin S. Banks, professor of optometry and vision science. "At the same time, the eyes must converge to the distance of the stereo content, which may be in front of or behind the screen."

Further studies are planned, which would include a larger number of test subjects, including children. The U Berkeley researchers hope that their findings could be used to establish guidelines for the positioning of viewers relative to 3D displays.

"Discomfort associated with viewing Stereo 3D is a major problem that may limit the use of technology," said Banks. "We hope that our findings will inspire more research in this area."

The research was recently published in The Association for Research and Vision in Ophthalmology's Journal of Vision.

Source: Gizmag

New Liquid Biomaterial Could Help Rebuild Faces Without Surgery

Doctors are testing a new liquid polymer that can be injected under the skin, molded and sculpted, then set in place with a LED array. Ultimately intended for use around the face, it sounds like a plastic surgeon's worst nightmare.

According to Technology Review, the compound is made of substances that are already used in cosmetic surgery, but has different properties than any before it.

It's a blend of hyaluronic acid-a biological material already used as a soft-tissue implant-and polyethylene glycol, a synthetic material. The blend is a liquid polymer that can be injected-thus avoiding the need for surgery. Once injected, the material can be sculpted into the necessary shape. When exposed to light of specific wavelengths, the messy tangle of polymer chains in the liquid implant rearrange into a stable, crosshatched form, stiffening the implant.

It only takes a few minutes in front of the LED light array before the material sets, and the procedure is generally pain-free once finished. Doctors recently completed a small trial in Canada, which was mostly successful (save for some unwanted inflammation), and they plan to launch a full-scale trial soon. 

Source: Gizmodo via Technology Review

A Transparent Battery to Power Next-Gen See-Through Gadgets

Stanford researcher Yi Cui looked across the field of transparent electronics and saw that all was not equal. While all other major electronics components--things like transistors, displays, and other circuitry--have been made transparent, no one had taken the time and effort to create a transparent power source. And you can’t have a fully transparent device without a transparent battery. So Cui made one.

There are a few ways to make an electronic component transparent. One is to make it so thin that it doesn’t register with the human eye. Or you can make the component take the form of a pattern whose features are so small they are invisible. Some battery components are easy to render transparent by shrinking them, but electrodes are particularly difficult to make thin. A super-thin electrode isn’t energy dense, and therefore it doesn’t store up enough power to be useful in any realistic way.

So Cui opted for the second approach. He and his team figured that if you can pattern the electrode into a superfine mesh, you can still build an energy dense battery. With enough electrode material distributed across the mesh, a battery can still hold a significant charge.

So using a relatively straightforward lithography method, they built a framework for the mesh in a soft, clear, spongy material called PDMS. To make a complete battery, they simply need two of these layers filled with electrode material--in this case, they used the makings of a standard lithium-ion battery--with a gel electrolyte (also clear, of course) sandwiched in between. Encase the whole thing in plastic, and you’ve got a see-through battery.

In the lab, the batteries have been used to power a small LED light (which can be viewed straight through the battery itself). Cui thinks the batteries should be roughly half as energy dense as a equally-sized regular battery. So right now the prototype is about as powerful as a NiCad battery, but Cui says he and his team should be able to improve that by an order of magnitude by reducing inefficiencies in the prototype design and layering batteries one atop the other. Depending on how it scales, the Stanford team thinks such transparent batteries could be commercialized in just two to four years.

[via popsci]

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

Time Travel Impossible ?

Shengwang Du and His Team Measured the Speed of a Photon

Hong Kong scientists claim to have proved that a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, making time travel seemingly impossible.

These findings are consistent with Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is the “traffic law of the universe” or, otherwise put, that nothing can travel faster than light. Of course, humanity’s dream of time travel has long relied on the hope that Einstein was wrong. We got a glimmer of hopeback in 1999 when scientists found superluminal (faster-than-light) propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said. Unfortunately, this was later revealed to be a visual effect, and the photons involved couldn’t actually transmit information.

Since then, there has been a debate surrounding whether or not a single photon might actually be able to travel faster than the speed of light. This experiment, conducted by a team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and led by Professor Shengwang Du, measured the ultimate speed of a photon using controllable waveforms. An explanation, from the press release:

"HKUST's team used a demonstration which required not only producing single photons, but separating the optical precursor, which is the wave-like propagation at the front of an optical pulse, from the rest of the photon wave packet. To do so, Prof Du's team generated a pair of photons, and then passed one of them through a group of laser-cooled rubidium atoms with an effect called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). For the first time, they successfully observed optical precursors of a single photon.

The team found that, as the fastest part of a single photon, the precursor wave front always travels at the speed of light in vacuum. The main wave packet of the single photon travels no faster than the speed of light in vacuum in any dispersive medium, and can be delayed up to 500 nanoseconds in a slow light medium. Even in a superluminal medium where the group velocity (of an optical pulse peak) is faster than the speed of light in vacuum, the main part of the single photon has no possibility to travel faster than its precursor."

What that means for us: probably no time travel. Du says their results "confirm the upper bound on how fast information travels with light. By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon." That indicates, in turn, that time travel is not possible, and that decades of beloved science fiction may not be entirely based on fact.

Source: Popsci via Daily Mail, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Trypophobia a Real Phobia? (Creepy Clustered Holes)

If you’re like me and you have a visceral reaction to the image above—if it makes your skin crawl, your hair hurt, and your stomach turn—you can count yourself among the trypophobic. According to its Facebook page, which is more than 4,000 members strong, trypophobia is fear of clustered holes. It is usually small holes in organic objects, such as lotus seed heads or bubbles in batter, that give trypophobics the extreme willies, triggering reactions like itchy skin, nausea and a general feeling of discomfort. 

Although this may be of no comfort to those who suffer from it, trypophobia is simply one of an infinite number of fears that people experience, some more idiosyncratic than others. The onlinePhobia List, run by an amateur etymologist, contains the names of hundreds of fears, from the well-known (fear of heights: acrophobia) to the fringe (fear of the great mole rat: zemmiphobia). Trypophobia hasn’t made the list yet.

According to Martin Anthony, a psychologist at Ryerson University in Toronto, past-president of the Canadian Psychological Association and author of The Anti-Anxiety Workbook, with the exception of a few terms (agoraphobia, claustrophobia and arachnophobia among them), professionals who study and treat phobias tend not to use all the Latin and Greek names that get tossed around on message boards and in the press.

Anthony wasn’t surprised to hear that some people have an intense aversion to clustered holes because “people can be afraid of absolutely anything.” The factors that contribute to fears and phobias include traumatic experiences (getting bitten by a dog leading to a fear of dogs, for example), observational learning (watching others be afraid of heights), information and instruction (learning to fear being alone in the dark after watching too many horror movies), and various biological factors (like an inherited predisposition to anxiety). “Although the studies on causes of fears have all focused on more common ones, such as spiders and snakes, there is no reason to think that different factors would be responsible for more unusual fears, Anthony says.

Trypophobia may also be catching. An element of so-called emotional contagion seems to be at work on Facebook, where some group members say they didn’t realize they were trypophobic until they started reading others’ comments and clicking on the pictures. “It’s not unusual to laugh harder at a funny movie if others around you are laughing,” Antony explains. “In the same way, we may be more likely to experience fear in a particular moment if others around us are fearful.” For me, however, all it took was a verbal mention of a “fear of small holes” to illicit a shudder. I became disgusted before looking at a single gnarly image of a skin graft or lamprey eel (look ’em up) or reading an online comment. I also immediately assumed that we were talking about biologic objects—holes in wood, in particular. Clearly, in me the fear was preexisting.

One trypophobic reported on Facebook that her fear stems back to childhood, when she had a Renaissance Faire dagger with a handle covered in little holes. Another member wrote: “I was stung by a bee in high school on my outer thigh. I had an allergic reaction, and my skin started to swell. The swelling was so bad, I could see each individual pore on my leg and I freaked out. Since then, I have not been able to look at clusters of holes without getting the heebie-jeebies.” Just. Gross.

Fear and disgust often go hand in hand, Anthony says. “Evolutionarily speaking, almost all of the things that arouse a strong disgust-reaction--spiders, mice, blood, vomit--are things that could have been triggers for fear of illness.” Perhaps the same could be true for little holes, especially in natural objects where they seem particularly out of place. I suspect that we’re disgusted by pockmarked objects because they don’t look quite “right”; these perceived deformities signal danger, which we manifest as revulsion. But then again, a fear of asymmetry (another form of things looking not quite right) in some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder is not associated with disgust, Antony says. Perhaps holes, particularly in organic objects, subconsciously remind us of the symptoms of contagious illnesses that affect the skin, such as the rash or blisters associated with measles and chicken pox, respectively. All of this, of course, is speculation, and just goes to show how little we know about trypophobia.

Masai Andrews hopes that will change. Andrews, who runs Trypophobia.com, founded the Facebook group page in 2009 when he was a sociology minor at SUNY-Albany. “I started the website and Facebook page because I suspected this was a very common phobia and I wanted a place where people could compile information,” Andrews says. “It is my hope that one day the academic and scientific communities will, at the very least, acknowledge the aversion to holes and certain patterns.”

When that happens, a Wikipedia page dedicated to the fear should follow. Surprisingly, one doesn’t exist today. “I can barely keep a page up on the subject without it getting taken down,” Andrews says. In March 2009 the powers that be at Wikipedia determined trypophobia to be a “likely hoax and borderline patent nonsense.” The deletion page also says that Wikipedia is “not for things made up one day.” As for who actually made the word up, that distinction probably belongs to a blogger in Ireland named Louise, Andrews says. According to an archived Geocities page, Louise settled on “trypophobia” (Greek for “boring holes” + “fear”) after corresponding with a representative at the Oxford English Dictionary. Louise, Andrews and trypophobia Facebook group members have petitioned the dictionary to include the word. The term will need to be used for years and have multiple petitions and scholarly references before the dictionary accepts it, Andrews says. I, for one, would prefer to forget about it forever.

Want to find out if you’re trypophobic? Take this quick visual test. But beware: You may be skipping lunch today.

Source: Popsci

First Artificial Neural Network Created from DNA

One of the things that our brains excel at is the ability to recognize what things are, even when presented with an incomplete set of data. If we know only that an animal is sold in pet stores and stuffs food in its cheeks, for instance, we can be pretty certain that the animal in question is a hamster. Now, for the first time ever, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a DNA-based artificial neural network that can do the same thing ... albeit on a very basic level. They believe that it could have huge implications for the development of true artificial intelligence.

The neural network is made up of just four artificial neurons, as opposed to the human brain's 100 billion real ones.

To test the network, the scientists played a game with it. That game started with the network being trained to "know" four scientists, each one identifiable by a unique combination of yes/no answers to the same four questions (such as "Is the scientist British?"). Human players then chose one of those scientists, and provided the network with an incomplete set of the identifying answers. They did this by dropping DNA strands that were programmed to correspond to those answers, into water in a test tube that contained the neurons.

Communicating through fluorescent signals, the network would then either correctly identify the chosen scientist, it would indicate that it didn't have enough data to identify just one scientist, or it would state that the data didn't match any of the scientists.

This was possible because of the manner in which the added strands of DNA paired with the strands already present in the network. This, in turn, was determined by whether or not the sequences programmed into both strands complimented one another.

It should be noted that the network took eight hours to come up with each of its responses, and that new DNA strands had to be created for each game. Still, theCaltech team state that the technology could ultimately be used for creating biochemical systems with artificial intelligence, which could revolutionize fields such as medicine, chemistry, and biological research.

The research was recently published in the journal Nature.

Source:Gizmag

Physicists Confirm Existence of New Particle

Physicists working at Fermilab’s particle accelerator have confirmed the observation of an entirely new particle — the the Xi-sub-b baryon.


Baryons are particles formed of three quarks, in different configurations. The proton is a baryon that consists of two up and one down quark, and the neutron is two down and one up. The Xi-sub-b has an up quark, a strange quark (yes, that’s its real name) and a heavy bottom quark (again, real name), meaning that it weighs around six times as much as a proton or neutron.

Its existence has been predicted for some time, but hadn’t previously been observed. It doesn’t stick around long, though — traveling a fraction of a millimeter before decaying into lighter particles.

Happily, Fermilab has smashed together almost 500 trillion sets of particles, so researchers were able to verify the particle’s existence multiple times over. The Xi-sub-b has been spotted 25 times.

Fermilab’s Tevatron, where the Xi-sub-b was discovered, is based in Illinois in the United States, and was the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world until the Large Hadron Collider opened below Geneva.

Source: Wired

Researchers create vaccine against heroin high

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute have created a vaccine that stops the high one gets from from heroin. Designed as a therapeutic option for those trying to break their addiction, the vaccine produces antibodies that stop heroin as well as other psychoactive compounds metabolized from heroin from reaching the brain to produce euphoric effects.

Previous efforts to create a clinically viable heroin vaccine have struggled because heroin is metabolized into multiple substances that each produce psychoactive effects. To overcome this problem the researchers, led by the study's principal investigator, Kim D. Janda, targeted not just the heroin itself, but also the chemical it quickly degrades into, 6-acetylmorphine (6AM), and morphine.

They linked a heroin-like hapten (a small molecule that elicits an immune response only when attached to a large carrier) to a generic carrier protein called keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH), and mixed it with Alum, a vaccine additive, to create a vaccine "cocktail." This mixture slowly degraded in the body, exposing the immune system to different psychoactive metabolites of heroin such as 6AM and morphine.

"Critically, the vaccine produces antibodies to a constantly changing drug target," said G. Neil Stowe, who is first author of the new study. "Such an approach has never before been engaged with drug-of-abuse vaccines."

Testing the vaccine on rats provided promising results. After several booster shots of the vaccine, heroin addicted rates were found to be less likely to self-administer heroin by pressing on a lever. Only three of the seven rats that received the vaccine self-administered heroin compared to all of the control rats, including those that had been given a vaccine that only targeted morphine.

The team also found that the heroin vaccine was highly specific, only producing an antibody response to heroin and 6AM and not to other opioid-related drugs tested, such as oxycodone, and drugs used to treat opioid dependence, such as methadone, naltrexone, and naloxone.

"The importance of this is that it indicates these vaccines could be used in combination with other heroin rehabilitation therapies," said Janda.

"In my 25 years of making drug-of-abuse vaccines, I haven't seen such a strong immune response as I have with what we term a dynamic anti-heroin vaccine," Janda added. "It is just extremely effective. The hope is that such a protective vaccine will be an effective therapeutic option for those trying to break their addiction to heroin."

The Scripps Research team has also recently begun collaborating with researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to see if it is feasible to develop a dual-purpose vaccine against HIV and for the treatment of heroin addiction in a single shot.

Source: Gizmag

Synthetic Vocal Cord gel could restore function to damaged vocal chords

Whether caused by intubation during surgery, laryngeal cancer, lesion removal, or simply overuse, vocal cord scarring can limit or even eliminate some peoples' ability to speak. This is because the scar tissue is stiff, and doesn't allow the vocal cords to vibrate adequately. Some doctors have tried to soften the tissue using materials from the fields of plastic surgery and dermatology, but the treatment doesn't work in all cases, and the effects are said not to last very long. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School, however, are developing a new approach - an injectable gel that mimics vocal cord tissue.

Rather than approaching the problem as a physiological one, they looked at the vocal cords as a mechanical issue. That is, they didn’t attack the scar tissue in the vocal cords but devised a fix for it. That fix came in the form of a material known as polyethylene glycol (PEG), which they chose because it is already FDA approved for other medical applications.

Lab tests have also shown that it can restore vibration to stiffened, scarred vocal cords. The MIT/Harvard project is attempting to restore vocal functions despite the presence of scar tissue, while other approaches (such as those involving drug treatments) have focused more on trying to get rid of that tissue.

Their PEG30 gel, should it receive its own FDA approval, would be categorized as an injectable medical device rather than a drug, which could further speed it to market. If approved, it would have to be re-injected every six months or so because it breaks down over time. But it could restore voice to many who have lost their primary means of expression.

The video below shows how the gel performs, as compared to actual vocal cords.