The DNA of cancer cells provides intriguing clues about how the disease might be defeated. Unfortunately for cancer patients, however, getting the DNA for analysis often requires invasive surgical ...biopsies. But researchers are making progress on a cost-effective method for avoiding that problem. They've developed a way to identify the cancer-causing mutations in cells even when only small amounts of DNA are available. Developed by RainDance Technologies, a maker of genomic tools based in Billerica, MA, the technology may one day enable doctors to perform a variety of molecular tests on small numbers of cells harvested from solid tumors or even found floating in blood samples.
Blood Sugar Crash Susan Young Rojahn
MIT Technology Review.com,
07/2014
Newspaper Article
“Glucose is a small molecule in and of itself,” explains Ishan Barman, a bioengineer at Johns Hopkins University who is also trying to develop a noninvasive glucose tracker based on Raman ...spectroscopy. Because noninvasive systems don’t directly test blood glucose, the changes in their readings can lag behind direct readings of the blood, he says. Noninvasive measurements do have advantages, however. Because they can be taken nearly continuously, they can be used to predict whether future glucose levels will move higher or lower. Developing software to translate the spectrographic readings into glucose levels is tricky, says Barman. Because the light used in Raman spectroscopy doesn’t penetrate very deeply, the system calculates blood glucose levels on the basis of glucose levels in the skin, and that calculation can vary from person to person, he says.
In April, a San Francisco–area startup called BaseHealth announced health-management software that integrates diet, exercise, genetic tests, and medical records, then calculates a patient’s risk for ...more than 40 diseases—including type 2 diabetes, lung cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease—and suggests ways to lower the risk of developing them. “Genetic data is one more piece of patient care data that helps motivate and excite patients,” says Katherine Sutherland, a physician in Silicon Valley who recently began offering BaseHealth’s application to some patients. Before a patient can use BaseHealth, a doctor must upload information, such as prescription history and physiological measures like blood pressure, that would commonly be found in an electronic medical record.
“In the U.S., generally speaking, it will take a decade or more and just shy of a billion dollars to get a vaccine licensed through the FDA,” says Gregory Poland, who heads the Vaccine Research Group ...at the Mayo Clinic. Instead of copying viral DNA using bacteria, which requires acquiring a copy of the virus’s genome, a potentially time-consuming process, the company had the DNA synthesized chemically, then used cultured insect cells to produce bits of protein from that DNA. ...while researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine reported last month that Novavax’s vaccine can generate anti-MERS antibodies in mice, they could not show whether that immune response actually protected the animals against any disease.
The researchers tested their implant in five adult rats and found that a certain stimulation pattern could reduce the rodents’ blood pressure by 40 percent without any major side effects. “The worst ...part is that the blood pressure is still high, which means they are at high risk for stroke, heart failure, and kidney failure,” he says. Bisognano has successfully reduced blood pressure with experimental implants that stimulate the carotid artery directly—an entirely different design from the implant developed by the German group.
