Medical

Avalue Technology's healthcare alliance partner, Bytec Healthcare based in the UK, worked closely with Medifix Services Limited and Thin Client specialist to provide a powered workstation solution to aid hospital staff with patient care workflow efficiencies, allowing them to access vital patient information whilst on the move around the Hospital.

One way to lower the cost of developing pharmaceutical drugs is by improving the predictive properties of preclinical screening. By making benchtop testing more realistic, ineffective drugs can fail faster and before they undergo expensive animal and human trials. To help tackle the issue, Alison McGuigan and her group at the University of Toronto in Canada have developed scaffold strips that can be loaded with cell populations and then rolled up...

Richard Fleischner, who directed the 1966 cult film Fantastic Voyage, would have been delighted with Bradley Nelson’s research: similar to the story in Fleischner’s film, Nelson wants to load tiny robots with drugs and manoeuvre them to the precise location in the human body where treatment is needed, for instance to the site of a cancer tumour. Alternatively, the tiny creatures could also be fitted with instruments, allowing operatio...

A test which can diagnose asthma from a patient's saliva has been developed by Loughborough University. Around 5.4 million people currently receive treatment for asthma in the UK, of which 1.1 million are children. To diagnose the condition doctors usually measure a person's airflow lung capacity, however lung function tests can be inaccurate and do not reflect underlying changes associated with asthma.

By coating tiny gel beads with lung-derived stem cells and then allowing them to self-assemble into the shapes of the air sacs found in human lungs, researchers at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have succeeded in creating 3D lung "organoids." The laboratory-grown lung-like tissue can be used to study diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which has traditionally been difficult to...

Rice University researchers have added a clever spin—a rotating grating that removes out-of-focus light—to a cutting-edge, minimally invasive fibre-optic microscope that lets oncologists and surgeons zoom in on cancer tumors prior to surgery. The research is published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Looking for food that could be harvested by astronauts far from Earth, researchers focused on spirulina, which has been harvested for food in South America and Africa for centuries. ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti ate the first food containing spirulina in space and now the knowledge is being applied to a pilot project in Congo as a food supplement. Preparing for long missions far from Earth, astronauts will need to harvest their own fo...

Every day, NASA spacecraft beam down hundreds of petabytes of data, all of which has to be codified, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" this data as well, highlighting similarities between datasets that scientists might miss. For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolu...

Nanoparticles offer a promising way to deliver cancer drugs in a targeted fashion, helping to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissue. However, most nanoparticles that have been developed so far are limited to carrying only one or two drugs. MIT chemists have now shown that they can package three or more drugs into a novel type of nanoparticle, allowing them to design custom combination therapies for cancer.

Researchers at the University of York have developed a sensor that is capable of detecting multiple proteins and enzymes in a small volume of blood, which could significantly speed up diagnostic healthcare processes. Currently tests to detect the presence of infection or disease require a sample of blood from a patient, which is later analysed in a laboratory to detect markers of disease.