An Integrated Circuit Made of Ions Could Bring Computing Into Your Cells

The human body isn't a metal machine, but it's still plenty complicated, and regulating it like a machine is tough to pull off. That's why a new discovery by Klas Tybrandt, a doctoral student in Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden, is exciting: he's developed the first integrated chemical chip, similar to silicon-based electronics, but for biologic material.

A chemical circuit made from it lets chemical substances—different types with different purposes—travel through the body, but still keeps them under control. Send a certain chemical to muscle synapses that aren't signaling, for example, and guide it via the circuit. (The big chemical contender in this seems to be the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which enables control of muscles.) Before this, the Organic Electronics research group at Linköping University had already developed transistors for transporting molecules, but this circuit offers a lot more flexibility—what was once delivery to single cells is now entire pathways.


Researchers are hoping this opens the gate for a whole new field of circuit technology based on ions and molecules instead of electrons and holes.

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Finnish Scientists Announce a Possible Universal Allergy Vaccine

Scientists at the University of Eastern Finland say they hope to have an allergy vaccine on the market in five to seven years.

For everything, from pollen to cat hair.

The antibody immunoglobulin E (IgE) works as the sneezy gatekeeper for allergies: it causes your white blood cells to release histamine, which in turn causes all of your favorite allergic responses, from a watery eyes to hay fever. Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Juhu Rouvinen have found a means of genetically modifying allergens so they won't bind with IgE, while still allowing them to interact with immunoglobulin G. IgG is the friendly cousin of IgE; it keeps allergies out by stopping the IgE-allergen complex from forming. That could block histamine from coming out of white blood cells, and thus block that runny nose.

After that, it's simple, at least in theory: Just load a modified version in a shot and let the immune system take care of the rest.

Five to seven years might be a few too many springs away for allergy sufferers, but the team has formed a bio-tech company, Desentum, to help in production.

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Ebola Virus Cured in Monkeys a Full Day After Infection

The Ebola virus—one of the world's deadliest diseases—has a kill rate of 90 percent. That's largely because the best current treatment must be applied within one hour of infection. Which is an almost impossibly brief window, considering symptoms may take anywhere from two to 21 days to appear in humans. But a new treatment has shown success in curing the disease when administered 24 hours or more after infection—at least when tested in monkeys.

Researchers at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada gave a group of monkeys the deadliest strain of Ebola, the Zaire virus, and treated four of them with an antibody cocktail 24 hours later. All four survived. Out of another group of four monkeys treated 48 hours after infection, two did. A monkey infected with the virus but untreated lived for five days after being infected.

The cocktail improves on other treatments by using antibodies that target different parts of a protein on the virus; shutting down that protein makes it more difficult for Ebola to infect cells in the body. That sounds promising, even if it's not a full-on miracle cure. If symptoms have already shown up, it might still be too late for treatment, but it could at least extend the window considerably.


A phase I clinical trial is set to begin on humans in late 2014. Not that they'll be infecting anyone; the treatment will be used on uninfected people to test the antibodies' safety in the human body.

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Oxygen-Monitoring Glasses Could Let You Read People's Moods Right Through Their Skin

The ability to read other people is largely perceived to be intuitive--some people just have a talent for “seeing” what other people are thinking or feeling. But what if you could augment yourself with such an ability, allowing you to perceive changes in other people’s biologies as their biochemical state changes? A company called 2AI Labs has developed a pair of glasses--known as O2Amps--that supposedly can do just that.


The glasses are so named because they rely on oxygen levels in the blood beneath the skin to extrapolate social signals from a person. The technology is based on the bio-evolutionary fact that color vision in primates--at least according to some research--developed to reveal fluctuations in blood-oxygen levels and to allow animals to take behavioral or social cues from those changes.

Humans have long since ceased consciously perceiving these subtle social signals, but they’re still there and with the right technology we can strengthen them. “Once one understands the connection between our color vision and blood physiology, it’s possible to build filters that further amplify our perception of the blood and the signals it provides,” researcher and 2AI Labs Director of Human Cognition Mark Changizi wrote in a blog post yesterday, a post that also announced the arrival of the first batch of O2Amps.

Changizi sees huge potential for his glasses in the mass market, but in particular he sees lots of room to apply them in specific fields like medicine, security, and gaming. O2Amps are reportedly already in testing at two hospitals, where the lenses make a patient’s veins appear to glow, revealing the vasculature beneath the skin. The glasses could also help medical personnel detect trauma via hemoglobin concentrations beneath the skin--simply by looking a patient over a nurse or doctor could quickly see where trauma has occurred and where it is heaviest.


Then there are applications in security--imagine airport security personnel that can see the nervousness on a suspicious person’s face--or even in sports (a pitcher’s blood-oxygen profile might tip his pitches, for instance). But the larger application is in our everyday social lives. Changizi seems to envision a day when your everyday glasses pack 2AI’s technology. Meaning everything from business lunches to first dates to interactions with one’s spouse could be colored by social cues imparted by their physiologies. Consider your poker face useless.

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Researchers Grow Functioning Human Liver Tissue from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Japanese researchers working with induced pluripotent stem cells have coaxed a semi-functional, liver-like tissue from a petri dish in what could mark a significant step forward for regenerative medicine and the science of creating new, working organs from scratch. There’s still a long way to go of course, but researchers are enthusiastic that the work could light the way forward for pluripotent stem cell research into organ generating technologies.


The team’s liver was grown from human skin cells reprogrammed to an embryo-like state and placed atop growth plates in a specially designed medium. Nine days later, the cells were expressing biomarkers indicative of maturing liver cells known as hepatocytes. With careful timing (informed by hundreds of trials) the team then introduced two more cell types that help recreate organ-like functions, including endothelial cells that line blood vessels.

Two days after that, the cells had assembled themselves into a 3-D, 5-millimeter-long tissue that mimicked early stage liver development. Though lacking bile ducts and not organized in exactly the same neat way natural hepatocytes organize themselves, the tissue did possess functional blood vessels that worked when the tissue was placed under the skin of a mouse. It was also able to metabolize some drugs that mouse livers cannot process but that human livers can.


By this measure, the team calls their tissue the first reported creation of a functioning human organ with working vasculature from pluripotent stem cells. In other words, it’s a big deal.

And while we’re still a long way from growing a full-grown, fully-functioning, transplantable liver from a patient’s own cells--and that is the ultimate goal here--this technology could more immediately be used as a short-term graft or even a replacement until a suitable donor liver can be found. Even more immediately, a constructed liver of this kind could be used for toxicity testing of drugs, wherein its lack of bile ducts wouldn’t even be an issue.

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Ultrasound in a Pill Could Replace Daily Injections

A daily shot is still the most effective, if most uncomfortable, form of treatment for many people with a chronic illness. Most pills work too slowly to be of much use for, say, someone with diabetes. But one company is planning a solution: packing ultrasound tech into a pill to orally deliver drugs as efficiently as a shot.

The idea isn't new, but the size and scope of it is. Ultrasounds can heat up molecules in skin tissue, creating a more permeable space for drugs to pass through. The staff at biomedical engineering company Zetroz have taken that and created the uPill, an ultrasound-powered pill that can speed up the drug absorption process. A person would swallow the pill, coated in the necessary drug, and ultrasound waves would prime the stomach for absorption. After that, the pill would pass through the digestive system.

The uPill is going through animal testing right now, but there are still practical barriers to human use.

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Injecting Oxygen Directly into the Bloodstream Could Save Suffocating Patients

When a person stops breathing--be it from an obstruction in the airway or something like acute lung failure--the clock is decidedly ticking. Deprived of oxygen for long enough, a person can go into cardiac arrest. Brain damage sets in. Without oxygen, things go south pretty quickly. So a team of researchers at Boston Children’s hospital has designed a kind of injectable oxygen that can be quickly introduced to a person’s bloodstream to oxygenate the blood, buying paramedics or other medical personnel perhaps as much as half an hour to remedy an oxygen flow problem.

The microparticle solution is different than blood substitutes, which do carry oxygen but need to be oxygenated by the lungs. These new microparticles consist of a single thin layer of lipids that encase a tiny bubble of oxygen gas. These particles are delivered to the bloodstream via injection in a liquid solution and can return a deoxygenated blood supply in vivo to near normal levels in a matter of seconds. And if a person gets in a situation where he or she needs this kind of therapy, seconds definitely count.

In animal tests, when the airway was completely blocked and no air could reach the lungs, an infusion of the microparticle solution kept the animals alive and in stable shape for 15 minutes without their taking a single breath. In humans facing a life or death situation, first responders could perhaps buy as much as 30 minutes by popping shots of oxygen into a patient’s bloodstream.


But quash all visions of injecting oneself with a steady dose of oxygenated particles and living indefinitely in an oxygen free environment. The oxygen is encased in lipids--basically fatty molecules--and carried in a solution that would overload the blood in high enough doses, causing a range of other biological complications that would make lack of oxygen just one problem among many. Still, 15-30 minutes isn’t bad if you’re at the receiving end.


The microparticles are portable, so given the right approvals every EMT, crash cart, transport helicopter, ambulance, police officer, firefighter, and clinician could keep a syringe full of oxygen particles handy, allowing them to quickly stabilize patients until some other life-saving technology, like a breathing tube, can more permanently rectify the situation.

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