Microscopic magnetic beads
move through the arteries of live pigs
Source: Applied Physics
Letters |
Tiny
bead's 'Fantastic Voyage'
Montreal —
In the 1966 flick The Fantastic Voyage a team
of scientists including Raquel Welch were shrunk and
submarined their way through a diplomat's bloodstream.
Well, kitsch 60s sci-fi may just have become reality.
Scientists from the École
Polytechnique in Montreal have succeeded in remotely
guiding a magnetic bead back and forth through the carotid
artery of a live pig using an MRI machine. The researchers
succeeded in moving the 1.5mm bead at a speed of 10cm
per second. The team hopes the technology will eventually
be used both diagnostically and therapeutically to deliver
targeted treatment to blood clots and tumours. Cancer
specialists, the researchers say, are particularly interested
in using the technology to pass through the blood-brain
barrier.
"It is the first time to our knowledge
that anyone has been able to control a device inside
the body without touching it," professor Dr Jean-Baptiste
Mathieu said.
Transgenic malaria-resistant
mosquito
Source: PNAS |
'Frankenbug'
repels malaria
BALTIMORE — A team of latter day Dr Frankensteins
from Johns Hopkins University may finally have answered
the age-old question, "why were mosquitoes put on this
earth?" The scientists have engineered the world's first
transgenic malaria-resistant mosquitoes. The 'Frankenbugs,'
genetically modified to ward off the disease-causing
parasite Plasmodium berghei, have an evolutionary
edge on normal mosquitoes bred on malaria-infected blood,
according to research published in PNAS online on March
19.
They lived longer and laid more
eggs than their wild-type counterparts in lab experiments.
In fact, the population of transgenic mosquitoes fed
on the blood of infected rodents grew from 50% to 70%
after nine generations. But don't expect them to be
unleashed just yet — they failed to outbreed their
normal friends when they were given clean blood to feed
on. Still, the results will have "important implications
for implementation of malaria control by means of genetic
modification of mosquitoes," the authors wrote.
Plastic
scaffold props up ligaments
CAMBRIDGE, MA — Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)
tears are among the most common injuries in sports —
and they're one of the longest to get over too. But
now, researchers at the University of Virginia have
developed a system that may allow injured athletes to
recover in time for training camp.
Using an FDA-approved polymer called
polyL-lactide (PLLA), already widely used in biomedical
devices, they've devised a synthetic scaffold that stabilizes
the knee and encourages the regeneration of ligament
tissue. That means faster, better healing and greater
odds of making a full recovery. "This is a very significant
discovery," Dr Robert Langer, a professor of chemical
and biological engineering told MIT Technology Review.
"I haven't seen anybody do what they're doing with ligaments
before."
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