7 Amazing Medical Research Projects in 2021
These amazing research projects are destined to change medtech!
November 30, 2021
POEMS Are the Key to Understanding the Heart
Who knew POEMS were the key to better understanding the human heart. Not those kinds of poems, but rather a new experimental system developed at the University of Bern called 'Panoramic Opto-Electrical Measurement and Stimulation (POEMS)' system.
The system combines for the first time optical and electrical recording of cardiac ventricular activation. The combination could give greater insight into how the interactions between different cell types of the heart influence the normal heart rhythm and possibly trigger life-threatening arrhythmias.
Fiber with Digital Capabilities
MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt.
Yoel Fink, who is a professor in the departments of materials science and engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, a Research Laboratory of Electronics principal investigator, and the senior author on the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection.
Fink and his colleagues describe the features of the digital fiber today in Nature Communications. Until now, electronic fibers have been analog — carrying a continuous electrical signal — rather than digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s.
The new fiber was created by placing hundreds of square silicon microscale digital chips into a preform that was then used to create a polymer fiber. By precisely controlling the polymer flow, the researchers were able to create a fiber with a continuous electrical connection between the chips over a length of tens of meters. The fiber itself is thin and flexible and can be passed through a needle, sewn into fabrics, and washed at least 10 times without breaking down.
Read the full MIT News story here.
Children's Pop-up Books Served as Inspiration for this Technology
Inspiration for medical innovation can come from anywhere. Case in point, University at Buffalo researchers developed a new method — inspired by children's pop-up books — for creating 3D artificial tissue.
Described in Advanced Science, the method is based upon compressive buckling – the structural engineering principle that explains why figures project outward from the pages of children’s pop-up books.
In a series of experiments, researchers used the compressive buckling method to fabricate a variety of three-dimensional polymeric structures. These include simple shapes, such as a box and a pyramid, as well as more complex demonstrations, such as a sound wave and an eight-legged design that resembles an octopus.
To showcase the method’s utility for tissue engineering, the team created an osteon-like structure. Osteon is the basic building unit of bone tissue and is characterized by osteocytes sparsely distributed in a mineral bone scaffold. Each osteocyte rests in a small cavity, known as lacunae, and different osteocytes are connected through canaliculi, which are small channels in the bone scaffold.
Click here for additional information about this research, including other co-authors on the paper.
Researchers Use AI and Stimulation to Strengthen the Brain
In a pilot human study, researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital show it is possible to improve specific human brain functions related to self-control and mental flexibility by merging artificial intelligence with targeted electrical brain stimulation.
Alik Widge, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and member of the Medical Discovery Team on Addiction at the U of M Medical School, is the senior author of the research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The findings come from a human study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston among 12 patients undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy -- a procedure that places hundreds of tiny electrodes throughout the brain to record its activity and identify where seizures originate.
In this study, Widge collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital's Sydney Cash, MD, PhD, an expert in epilepsy research; and Darin Dougherty, MD, an expert in clinical brain stimulation. Together, they identified a brain region -- the internal capsule -- that improved patients' mental function when stimulated with small amounts of electrical energy. That part of the brain is responsible for cognitive control -- the process of shifting from one thought pattern or behavior to another, which is impaired in most mental illnesses.
The team developed algorithms so that after stimulation, they could track patients' cognitive control abilities, both from their actions and directly from their brain activity. The controller method provided boosts of stimulation whenever the patients were doing worse on a laboratory test of cognitive control.
The research team is now preparing for clinical trials. Because the target for improving cognitive control is already approved by FDA for deep brain stimulation, researchers said this can be done with existing tools and devices -- once a trial is formally approved -- and the translation of this care to current medical practice could be rapid.
Is Urine the Key to Understanding Transplant Rejections?
A study by investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Exosome Diagnostics proposes a new, non-invasive way to test for kidney transplant rejection using exosomes - tiny vesicles containing mRNA - from urine samples.
Their findings are published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Before this study, physicians ordered biopsies or blood tests when they suspected that a transplant recipient was rejecting the donor organ. Biopsy procedures pose risks of complications, and 70% to 80% of biopsies end up being normal. Additionally, creatinine blood tests do not always yield definitive results. Because of the limitations surrounding current tests, researchers sought alternate and easier ways to assess transplant efficacy.
In this study, researchers took urine samples from 175 patients who were already undergoing kidney biopsies advised by physicians. From these samples, investigators isolated urinary exosomes from the immune cells of the newly transplanted kidneys. From these vesicles, researchers isolated protein and mRNA and identified a rejection signature -- a group of 15 genes -- that could distinguish between normal kidney function and rejection. Notably, researchers also identified five genes that could differentiate between two types of rejection: cellular rejection and antibody-mediated rejection.
This research differs from prior attempts to characterize urinary mRNA because clinicians isolated exosomes rather than ordinary urine cells. The exosomal vesicle protects mRNA from degrading, allowing for the genes within the mRNA to be examined for the match rejection signature.
Shapeshifting Microrobots that Fight Cancer on a Cellular Level
No, it’s not from a science fiction movie or from an episode of a popular kid’s television show. It’s real life. Researchers, in a proof-of-concept study, have made fish-shaped microrobots that are guided with magnets to cancer cells, where a pH change triggers them to open their mouths and release their chemotherapy cargo.
Scientists have previously made microscale (smaller than 100 µm) robots that can manipulate tiny objects, but most can't change their shapes to perform complex tasks, such as releasing drugs. Some groups have made 4D-printed objects (3D-printed devices that change shape in response to certain stimuli), but they typically perform only simple actions, and their motion can't be controlled remotely.
In a step toward biomedical applications for these devices, Jiawen Li, Li Zhang, Dong Wu and colleagues wanted to develop shape-morphing microrobots that could be guided by magnets to specific sites to deliver treatments. Because tumors exist in acidic microenvironments, the team decided to make the microrobots change shape in response to lowered pH.
So, the researchers 4D printed microrobots in the shape of a crab, butterfly or fish using a pH-responsive hydrogel. By adjusting the printing density at certain areas of the shape, such as the edges of the crab's claws or the butterfly's wings, the team encoded pH-responsive shape morphing. Then, they made the microrobots magnetic by placing them in a suspension of iron oxide nanoparticles.
The researchers demonstrated various capabilities of the microrobots in several tests. For example, a fish-shaped microrobot had an adjustable "mouth" that opened and closed. The team showed that they could steer the fish through simulated blood vessels to reach cancer cells at a specific region of a petri dish. When they lowered the pH of the surrounding solution, the fish opened its mouth to release a chemotherapy drug, which killed nearby cells. Although this study is a promising proof of concept, the microrobots need to be made even smaller to navigate actual blood vessels, and a suitable imaging method needs to be identified to track their movements in the body, the researchers say.
Researchers Develop a New Kind of Neural Interface System
A team of researchers has taken a key step toward a new concept for a future brain-computer interface (BCI) system -- one that employs a coordinated network of independent, wireless microscale neural sensors, each about the size of a grain of salt, to record and stimulate brain activity.
The sensors, dubbed "neurograins," independently record the electrical pulses made by firing neurons and send the signals wirelessly to a central hub, which coordinates and processes the signals.
In a study published on August 12 in Nature Electronics, the research team demonstrated the use of nearly 50 such autonomous neurograins to record neural activity in a rodent.
The results, the researchers say, are a step toward a system that could one day enable the recording of brain signals in unprecedented detail, leading to new insights into how the brain works and new therapies for people with brain or spinal injuries.
The goal of this new study was to demonstrate that the system could record neural signals from a living brain -- in this case, the brain of a rodent. The team placed 48 neurograins on the animal's cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, and successfully recorded characteristic neural signals associated with spontaneous brain activity.
The team also tested the devices' ability to stimulate the brain as well as record from it. Stimulation is done with tiny electrical pulses that can activate neural activity. The stimulation is driven by the same hub that coordinates neural recording and could one day restore brain function lost to illness or injury, researchers hope.
Researchers Develop a New Kind of Neural Interface System
A team of researchers has taken a key step toward a new concept for a future brain-computer interface (BCI) system -- one that employs a coordinated network of independent, wireless microscale neural sensors, each about the size of a grain of salt, to record and stimulate brain activity.
The sensors, dubbed "neurograins," independently record the electrical pulses made by firing neurons and send the signals wirelessly to a central hub, which coordinates and processes the signals.
In a study published on August 12 in Nature Electronics, the research team demonstrated the use of nearly 50 such autonomous neurograins to record neural activity in a rodent.
The results, the researchers say, are a step toward a system that could one day enable the recording of brain signals in unprecedented detail, leading to new insights into how the brain works and new therapies for people with brain or spinal injuries.
The goal of this new study was to demonstrate that the system could record neural signals from a living brain -- in this case, the brain of a rodent. The team placed 48 neurograins on the animal's cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, and successfully recorded characteristic neural signals associated with spontaneous brain activity.
The team also tested the devices' ability to stimulate the brain as well as record from it. Stimulation is done with tiny electrical pulses that can activate neural activity. The stimulation is driven by the same hub that coordinates neural recording and could one day restore brain function lost to illness or injury, researchers hope.
Every year the editors at MD+DI are amazed at some of the research done in universities and institutions to enhance medtech. This year researchers worked on a broad array of projects, from shapeshifting cancer-fighting robots to neural interface systems.
MD+DI has compiled a list of medical research that collectively blew our minds.
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