Typically, doctors feed oxygen-deprived patients the gas through ventilators such as tubes in the mouth or nose, but the treatment depends on functioning lungs. The experience led Kheir to work ...toward developing a fast-acting, intravenous treatment that could help patients like her with acute, severe lung injury. “The goal is not to make ventilators obsolete, but to make patients healthier,” says Kheir.
During April and May this year, 14 people in the United States were infected by an outbreak of food-borne E. coli. Last month, OpGen announced that a dozen public health agencies, including the CDC, ...had joined a consortium to evaluate what role the company’s technology could play in enhanced genotyping of outbreak-causing bacteria. In 2011, officials in Germany took just 48 hours to determine that an E. coli outbreak blamed for infecting some 850 people and killing 32 came from a single source of a unique strain of the bacteria, indicated by a unique and consistent pattern in the optical map.
“Every pharma company needs biotech in order to access innovation that is either closer to a university or at some early stage of a biotech company, and at the same time, biotech needs pharma because ...of large capital needs to develop a compound.” New technologies and concepts have brought about a revolution in the life sciences in the last decade, yet “pharma is struggling to capture that and translate it into new therapeutics,” said Anthony Coyle of Pfizer at a Wednesday session on early-stage collaboration. Janssen Research and Development, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, recently partnered with the Boston-area venture capital group Polaris in search of early-stage biotech companies.
By characterizing the ecology of the bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbes that inhabit healthy people, the researchers have established a baseline for the normal “human microbiome.” The ...metagenomic sequences are a mixture of all the genes found in the microbial communities and give the researchers a “parts list” of the enzymes and other functional molecules each microbial community can make. ...while the species of bacteria in different individuals’ guts may vary, the suite of metabolic processes the communities can perform was largely the same.
Other companies have introduced Web- or cloud-based services to perform such an analysis, but Knome’s software suite can operate within a hospital’s network, which is critically important for ...privacy-concerned hospitals. The greatest benefit of the widespread adoption of genomics in the clinic will come from the “clinical intelligence” doctors gain from networks of patient data, says Martin Tolar, CEO of Knome. Information about the association between certain genetic variants and disease or drug response could be anonymized—that is, no specific patient could be tied to the data—and shared among large hospital networks.
...a set of robotic tools developed by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital could eventually enable surgeons to operate on the heart through small incisions while the heart continues to beat. ...The team at Boston Children’s Hospital instead uses curved-metal-tube robots to create a stiffer tool delivery platform inside the heart. “With these devices, we are trying to get best of both worlds”—that is, a minimally invasive procedure that can make use of all skills of a surgeon, says Howie Choset, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who is developing his own surgical robotic devices.
The locomotion resulting from this kind of stimulation is automatic and involuntary and is thought to require no direct communication from the brain. Because the spinal column could control the ...walking pattern, Courtine suspected that only a weak signal from the brain would be necessary for the animals to start walking voluntarily. The combination of electrochemical stimulation and active training, which included walking up stairs and around obstacles, resulted in new neuronal connections that bypassed the site of injury. Even though all connections between the brain and the lower spinal cord were disrupted in the experimental rats, “there are some remaining fibers, so the beauty of their technology is using the robotic training system to activate those remaining connections that can allow the cortex to control the limbs and to regain voluntary movement,” says Zhigang He, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.
...only a small fraction of stroke patients seek medical attention soon enough for this intervention. The company originally licensed dalfampridine from drugmaker Elan in the hope of using it to ...treat spinal-cord injuries, but instead it found more success in treating multiple sclerosis patients. Spinal-cord injuries still garner a lot of focus from the company, which hopes to begin testing a compound licensed from Medtronic that protects neurons from the wave of cell death that follows the initial injury.
