Category: Conference

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/108/

Harvard researchers are developing a device that could be used to rapidly remove pathogens from the blood of patients with sepsis.  The dialysis-like machine acts as an artificial spleen, filtering the blood using injectable magnetic nanobeads engineered to stick to microorganisms and toxins.  After the beads are injected, blood is removed and run through a device that uses a magnetic-field gradient to extract the nanobead-bound germs. The blood is then returned to the body.  The team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering hopes that the device will be able to identify the specific microorganism causing the patient’s blood infection.  This could help physicians more quickly determine the most effective antibiotic treatment.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130524-zapping-bacteria-the-wireless-way

Professor John Rogers of the University of Illinois has created bio-absorbable electronic circuits which could be implanted into wounds and powered wirelessly to destroy bacteria during healing before dissolving harmlessly into body fluids once their job is done.  Rogers and others have previously reported biodegradable flexible circuits and electronic devices that can be safely laid directly onto skin. But their success in making their circuits wireless could prove crucial to many potential applications, especially in medicine.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-d-printer-synthetic-tissues.html

Oxford University scientists have created a custom-built programmable 3D printer that can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues.

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. These printed ‘droplet networks’ could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues – such as those that use stem cells.

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibm_predictions_for_future/ideas/index.html

IBM published its annual report, this year focusing on the five basic senses.  Highlighted future abilities of computers include:

-the ability to identify distinctive image features, foregoing the need for tags

-the development a sense of taste

-smelling computers that detect explosives in the public and cancer in our bodies

-touch sensitivity, allowing us to feel textures

http://blogs.computerworld.com/healthcare-it/21405/top-four-trends-will-shape-digital-health

As we approach 2013, the following trends continue to spawn companies, investment, and technologies:

1. The proliferation of personalized mobile health technologies. 
2. The maturation of the Big Data ecosystem in health care.
3. The rise of health startup accelerators.
4. The emergence of health care exchange and alternative care delivery platforms.