Medical

Renishaw’s latest drug delivery system, to be used in partnership with Herantis Pharma Plc’s drug candidate CDNF for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, is about to enter phase 1-2 clinical trials. The study will be supported by a €6 million grant from Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s are notoriously difficul...

Here’s how to build a whirligig: Thread a loop of twine through two holes in a button. Grab the loop ends, then rhythmically pull. As the twine coils and uncoils, the button spins at a dizzying speed. Inspired by a toy, Stanford bioengineers have developed an inexpensive, human-powered blood centrifuge that will enable precise diagnosis and treatment of diseases like malaria, African sleeping sickness and tuberculosis in the poor, off-...

A high-strength fast curing epoxy for use in the assembly of medical devices, the Master Bond EP3HTND-2Med Black, fully meets USP Class VI specifications. This one part system delivers resistance to a variety of sterilisation methods such as chemical sterilants, EtO, radiation and especially autoclaving.

Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a method to control proteins inside live cells with the flick of a switch, giving researchers an unprecedented tool for pinpointing the causes of disease using the simplest of tools: light. The work, led by Klaus Hahn and Nikolay Dokholyan and spearheaded by Onur Dagliyan, a graduate student in their labs, builds on the breakthrough technology known as optogenetics.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a computational model of a neural circuit in the brain, which could shed light on the biological role of inhibitory neurons — neurons that keep other neurons from firing. The model describes a neural circuit consisting of an array of input neurons and an equivalent number of output neurons.

People are born with brains riddled with excess neural connections. Those are slowly pruned back until early childhood when, scientists thought, the brain’s structure becomes relatively stable. Now a pair of studies, published in the issues of Science and in Cerebral Cortex, suggest this process is more complicated than previously thought. For the first time, the group found microscopic tissue growth in the brain continues in regions t...

A large global new partnership called 'MultipleMS', coordinated by Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has been awarded 15 million euro from the European Commission in the Horizon2020 program to find novel and better treatments for Multiple Sclerosis (MS). In this project, 21 universities and companies from Europe and the USA will unite efforts to tailor the development and application of therapies to the individual MS patient.

To produce drugs sustainably and cheaply, anywhere you want. Whether in the middle of the jungle or even on Mars. A 'mini-factory' whereby sunlight can be captured to make chemical products. Inspired by the art of nature where leaves are able to collect enough sunlight to produce food, chemical engineers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have presented such a scenario. They describe their prototype reactor - consciously shaped as a lea...

A study has revealed a technology how to cover biodegradable implants with a human skeleton similar mineral. Bone tissue regeneration, one of the issues of tissue engineering, is a research area for Dmitry Gorin and his international colleagues, a leading research fellow at the RASA Center in Tomsk Polytechnic University. The scientists have developed a new vaterite-based coating for nanofiber material used as scaffold to grow bone tissue ce...

A technique that will allow scientists to determine the effects of turning on and off a set of molecules involved in almost every cellular pathway, determine their downstream effects, and uncover new drug targets has been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The finding is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Protein kinases are enzymes involved in almost every biological pr...