Retinal Implant Brings Eyesight To The Blind

Forbes - About 200,000 people in the United States and Europe suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes the slow degradation of eyesight starting from a young age, and often leads to blindness. The problem is that the genes in the eye are “programmed” to produce the wrong number of proteins that are needed for the cells. Over time, this causes the rods and cones in the eye end up dying, which is what leads to diminished and then lost eyesight.

Right now, there are no approved treatments to either restore eyesight or even slow the progression of the disease, but that may soon change as teams of researchers and companies are working on curing the condition.

One of those companies, Retinal Implant, AG, has developed a new retinal implant that partially restores vision to people who’ve lost their sight to retinitis pigmentosa. A first round of human clinical trials began in 2005 and concluded in 2010. That trial showed extraordinary promise, and the results were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in November of 2010. The results showed that patients who received the implant had their eyesight partially restored to the point where they could distinguish objects and shapes and even read.

The implant itself is a small electronic chip, only 9 square mm, that’s implanted directly beneath the retina. The chip contains about 1500 electrodes and are powered inductively by transmitter coils placed under the skin. When light coming into the eye hits the electrodes, the chip converts the light into electricity, which then stimulates nerves in the retina. The stimulation is then perceived by the brain as sight. This differs from other implant technologies, which rely on cameras to capture and interpret the images.          More

Video: Researchers Watch Type 1 Diabetes As It Unfolds, in Real Time

T Cells Attacking This image, captured from video, shows the T cells (purple dots) attacking the pancreatic islets (green images in center), which contain the insulin‑producing beta cells. Beta cell destruction leads to type 1 diabetes. The attack continues over several hours before a number of beta cells are destroyed. La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology

A new real-time view of immune cells attacking the pancreas sheds light on how type 1 diabetes unfolds, as white blood cells seek out and destroy insulin-producing beta cells. Researchers believe it could help point the way to new intervention methods to halt the destruction before the onset of type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes.

Diabetes results from the body’s lack of ability to produce sufficient insulin, which keeps blood glucose levels in check. Type 1 is an autoimmune disorder in which the body’s T lymphocytes attack and kill the pancreas’ insulin-making beta cells; type 2 also involves pancreatic destruction and can result from several factors, though in this country it is often the result of poor diet and obesity. There is no cure, at least not yet. Watching exactly how the destructive process unfolds could be a major step in that direction, however.

Researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology used two-photon excitation microscopy and a new imaging technique to access a live, functioning pancreas in a mouse. The pancreas is small, soft and tucked away beneath other organs in the abdominal area, so it’s difficult to see in action. This study marks the first time researchers have used two-photon microscopy to study the pancreas (it’s previously been used to image the liver, lymph nodes and some other organs).                   More

Smartphone Touchscreens Could Analyze Biological Smears to Diagnose Illness

Diagnosis via Touchscreen Daniel Zanetti via Wikimedia

PopSci - The lab-on-a-chip model has been praised as the future of simplified diagnostic medicine–place a sample of saliva, blood, or urine on a small chip-like device that traps disease biomarkers, and send it off to a lab for analysis and diagnosis. But a couple of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology think we could simplify that process even further by doing the lab work on the touchscreens of our smartphones.

The duo thinks they can tap the property of capacitance that enables touchscreens to sense our fingertips to analyze much smaller things, like DNA or pathogens. Touchscreens are far more sensitive than they need to be to simply sense our fingers, they say, and that ability to detect small changes of capacitance could allow us to place a sample directly on our smartphone screens and analyze it for pathogens or disease markers. As NewScisays: spit on your iPhone, diagnose what’s ailing you.            More

For the First Time, Lab-Grown Blood Is Pumped Into a Human’s Veins

Red Blood Cell Wikimedia Commons

PopSci - Artificial blood may become a common reality, thanks to the first successful transfusion of lab-grown blood into a human. Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, extracted hematopoietic stem cells from a volunteer’s bone marrow, and encouraged these cells to grow into red blood cells with a cocktail of growth factors. Douay’s team labeled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (equalling 2 milliliters of blood) back into the marrow donor’s body.

After five days, 94 to 100 percent of the blood cells remained circulating in the body. After 26 days, 41 to 63 percent remained, which is a normal survival rate for naturally produced blood cells. The cells functioned just like normal blood cells, effectively carrying oxygen around the body. “He showed that these cells do not have two tails or three horns and survive normally in the body,” said Anna Rita Migliaccio of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

This is great news for international health care. “The results show promise that an unlimited blood reserve is within reach,” says Douay. The world is in dire need of a blood reserve, even with the rising donor numbers in the developed world. This need is even higher in parts of the world with high HIV infection rates, which have even lower reserves of donor-worthy blood.      More

New Phase-Changing Gel Method Repairs Severed Blood Vessels Better than Stitches

Human Artery Cross-Section Wikimedia Commons

A new heat-sensitive gel and glue combo is a major step forward for cardiovascular surgery, enabling blood vessels to be reconnected without puncturing them with a needle and thread. It represents the biggest change to vascular suturing in 100 years, according to Stanford University Medical Center researchers.

Sutures are an effective way to reconnect severed blood vessels, but they can introduce complications, for instance when cells are traumatized by the puncturing needle and clog up the vessel, which can lead to blood clots. What’s more, it’s difficult to suture blood vessels less than 1 millimeter wide, the Stanford team said. One of the authors on this study, Stanford microsurgeon Dr. Geoffrey Gurtner, was inspired to work on this problem a decade ago after a five-hour surgery in which he reattached the severed finger of a year-old infant, according to Stanford Medical School.

Sutures work by stitching together sides of a blood vessel and then tightening the stitch to pull open the lumen, or the inner part of the vessel, so the blood can flow through. Gluing a vessel together instead would require keeping the lumens open to their full diameter — think of trying to attach two deflated balloons. But dilating the lumen by inserting something inside introduces a wide range of problems, too.               More