Before a drug can be approved as safe for human use by the FDA, it has to undergo rigorous testing to ensure its safety. Unfortunately, there are many drugs that seem safe in trials but are then recalled when they are found to cause damage to the liver. Nearly every drug that we take ends up passing through the liver since it is the body’s natural toxin filter, but the testing resources available to drug companies aren’t as effective as they should be. Now, Organovo’s mini 3D printed livers could change that and remove some of the risk of new medications.

Organovo has been printing real human livers – albeit on an itty-bitty scale – since 2013. These exVive3D, as Organovo calls them, are now available for sale to pharmaceutical companies for drug trials. They are roughly hexagonal in shape and consist of of primary human hepatocytes, stellate, and endothelial cell types, which are all found in natural human livers. The mini-organs are stable for at least 42 days, as compared to the 48-hour active lifespan of industry-standard 2D liver cell testing systems.

This is a giant leap forward in drug testing and the creation of safer medicines. Until now, drugs have been tested on lab rats and on tiny single layers of liver cells in the lab, but those tests can’t always predict how the drugs will interact with actual living human livers. Organovo used the exVive3D “livers” to test a drug which had initially been approved by the FDA but later recalled because it was found to cause liver damage. The drug had passed the original traditional drug trials, but the Organovo models detected that it would cause liver damage. Going forward, using these tiny 3D printed livers could – and should, in our opinion – become industry standard for drug testing. Switching over to actual 3D printed organs for drug testing could dramatically reduce drug recalls and associated adverse health effects.

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With any long-term medication, it’s very important to make sure that the drug maintains a steady level in the patient’s bloodstream. That’s difficult to do without weekly or even daily trips to a doctor’s office. A device called MEDIC (Microfluidic Electrochemical Detector for In vivo Concentrations) developed at UC Santa Barbara could keep track of medication concentration in real time.

According to the team behind the project, current dosing methods are primitive and mostly based on educated guesses, taking into account the patient’s weight or age. They don’t, however, consider a patient’s metabolism, diet, or other medications. The MEDIC implant is just a little larger than a jumbo paperclip and contains a gold-lined microfluidics chamber. Artificial DNA strands called aptamers extend from the chamber.

The aptamers catch the target molecules and send a little jolt of current to the MEDIC device, signaling the presence of the molecule in the blood. The method allows doctors to see how the drug is metabolizing in a patient’s body, which is a vital part of ensuring the efficacy of the treatment and the health of the patient. The device is in its early stages and still needs to undergo plenty of testing before it’s approved for use – but it’s promising, and the technology can adapt in future iterations to help control biological systems that need constant monitoring and intervention.

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We all know the rules for a night out: don’t accept an opened drink, watch your drink at all times, and don’t drink from a communal source like a punch bowl. These guidelines are meant to keep drinkers safe from the effects of “date rape drugs.” But drug-assisted rapes are a sad reality that just don’t seem to be going away, even with increased education.

To keep people safe from the effects of the three most common date rape drugs (GHB, Ketamine and Rohypnol), a Boston-based startup is developing a line of drinkware that changes colors when those drugs are present. It’s called DrinkSavvy, and it’s quite simple in theory: the products include a material that immediately creates a visual warning when a drink has been tampered with.

For now, the DrinkSavvy line of products includes straws, plastic cups and drink stirrers. But the team envisions the line eventually including reusable glasses and even bottles. They hope to eventually have their wares in bars around the world to make nights out just a little safer.

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No matter how old you get, seeing the doctor pull out a giant hypodermic needle and aim it at you is enough to give anyone the temporary terrors. The medical community has been working on alternative delivery methods for medicines for quite a while now, and it looks like microneedles are the front-runners. These painless little patches of tiny needles deliver medicines as easily as putting on an adhesive bandage, leaving behind none of the hazardous bio-waste created by hypodermic needles. A research team at Tufts University has taken the microneedle concept and moved it one step further by creating the tiny needles out of a type of silk.

According to the bioengineers behind the project, it can be very difficult to manufacture effective microneedles with current procedures. The pharmaceuticals meant to be delivered by the system can often be destroyed by harsh manufacturing conditions and then fail to be released in the patient’s body in a controlled and effective way. But the biomaterial silk fibroin is an ideal answer to these problems, offering an easy way to alter the rate of delivery and lowering the risk of infection (over conventional microneedle production methods). One huge benefit microneedles have over traditional hypodermic needle-delivered drugs is that they don’t require refrigeration, making them more stable for delivery to remote areas.

The post Tiny Silk Microneedles Deliver Meds Better Than Syringes first appeared on Gajitz.

Most of us know all sorts of methods for preventing unwanted drugs from making their way into our drinks, but none of them are 100% foolproof. Scientists at the University of Tel Aviv have developed one more tool to help keep drinks safe from the nefarious types who might drop something or another into them. The new detection kit consists of a single straw or stirrer that would react with certain chemicals in a beverage, prompting the liquid to become cloudy or change color. So far, the device has been able to detect the presence of certain drugs with 100% accuracy and zero false positives.

The straw can currently only detect GHB and ketamine, but in the future will be able to sniff out Rohypnol (roofies) as well. And don’t worry about having to carry around a straw for every drink you plan to consume: the little plastic piece can be re-used over and over until/unless it comes into contact with one of the substances it’s meant to detect.

The post Drink to Your Health: Smart Straw IDs Date Rape Drugs first appeared on Gajitz.