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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Diagnostic tests for measuring various health parameters usually involve drawing blood, which is invasive and kind of icky. But a team of researchers at the University of Cincinnati and the US Air Force Research Lab have invented a much less painful system that involves using sweat to track health.

The system involves a Band-Aid-like adhesive patch that uses microfluidics to collect sweat from the skin. You don’t have to run a marathon to work up a sweat; the device will use an electrical process called iontophoresis to stimulate the production of sweat. The process applies a very small electrical charge to the skin – so small that the pain experienced by the patient is minimal. The method can keep sweat flowing from a very small area of the skin for hours or even days if the researchers need it to.

The patch then wicks away small amounts of sweat via microfluidic channels for analysis. Super-absorbent hydrogels keep the sweat pumping even after it’s passed through the sensors by soaking up the old sweat so that it doesn’t mix with new sweat. The electronics in the patch have no power source of their own; the patch contains a small RFID-like chip that is externally powered by a smartphone.

It’s this smartphone that provides the analysis, as well. Initially the team had their collective eye on using the patch to monitor athletes’ health. Knowing when your electrolytes are low can be crucial when you’re training, which is lucky because electrolytes are simple to measure. The team thinks they will soon be able to measure other factors like lactic acid, metabolites, proteins, amino acids, and creatinine with the patch. Although measuring glucose, or blood sugar levels, would be an amazing use of this technology, science has yet to figure out how to do that using sweat.

The system could be useful for a huge number of people and situations. Premature babies could be monitored for any changes in their general health. Medication levels in a patient’s sweat could help doctors to determine correct dosages. Military members could be monitored in the field for signs of muscle exertion, injury, and exhaustion. A large number of other physical factors can be read through a person’s sweat, so there’s a good chance that in the future you’ll be experiencing fewer blood draws but more tiny electroshocks to analyze your sweat.

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Figuring out the way the human brain understands and processes speech could be a huge step forward in helping nonverbal people communicate. Scientists have already made progress toward that goal in a study that analyzed the neural activity of 15 people undergoing surgery for epilepsy treatment or brain tumors. The patients wore electrodes that recorded their brain activity when listening to spoken words. Later, the team studied which types of brain activity correlated with aspects of speech like frequency and rhythm. With this data and some specialized software, they were able to reconstruct some of the sounds the patients heard.

Now, a new study measured the neural activity of patients reading words aloud and reading silently to themselves. Again, the researchers used the neural activity to pinpoint which areas of the brain were stimulated by reading the words aloud . Using this road map of sorts, they were able to decode which areas of the brain were active when reading the same words silently. Although the brain patterns differed somewhat between spoken words and internal words, the researchers were still able to reproduce some of the words the patients read to themselves. They could, in effect, kind of read the patients’ minds sometimes.

If the same type of road map were to be constructed for nonverbal people, the initial neural activity measured would have to come from speech that the patient hears, not their own speech. But according to the researchers, this should be easy enough to accomplish – as easy as figuring out how to read a mind can be, anyway. From there, measuring the neural activity of the nonverbal person could allow researchers to understand what that person is thinking.

The research results have been promising, but they are nowhere near advanced enough to build a device to do the decoding (hence our amusing depictions of mind reading helmets). Other types of brain activity still need to be decoded, and algorithms need to be fine-tuned, but we are ever inching closer to the goal of reading each other’s minds. Time to break out the tin-foil hats?

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Spinal cord regeneration was once an impossible dream for doctors and patients. Once a spinal cord injury rendered a patient paralyzed, there was nothing that could be done to repair the damage. A groundbreaking new treatment, however, has given the medical community new hope. The lucky recipient of the world’s first application of this treatment was Darek Fidyka, a Polish man who was paralyzed after being stabbed in the back in 2010. Researchers from the UK and Poland worked together to test the idea that olfactory bulbs – small structures in your brain that control your sense of smell – could help to regenerate cells in the spinal cord.

(image via: BBC News)

The team looked to cells from the olfactory bulb because olfactory nerves are the only part of the nervous system known to regenerate following an injury. The researchers removed one of Mr. Fidyka’s olfactory bulbs and grew cells from it – cells which were then injected at the injury site. Strips of nerve tissue from the patient’s ankle were placed on the gap in his spinal cord in the hopes that the injected cells would encourage regrowth. This method was tested successfully on dogs in 2012, but Mr. Fidyka was the first human patient.

After intensive physical therapy and some healing time, he has regained some sensation in his lower body. The most amazing result of the surgery, however, is that he is now able to walk with a walker just two years post-surgery. The research team is cautiously optimistic about the treatment, stating that they need to try the treatment in a larger number of patients with similar injuries before concluding that this is the answer for spinal cord repair. They also want to find a way to extract the needed cells in a less invasive manner than the brain surgery Mr. Fidyka had to undergo. In a stroke of luck, the patient has even retained his sense of smell even after having one olfactory bulb removed. The findings were published in the journal Cell Transplantation.

The post Smell of Victory: Paralyzed Man Walks After Nose Cell Graft first appeared on Gajitz.

A brand new human life may just have been saved thanks to the combined technologies of MRI and 3D printing. Dr. Emile Bacha, a surgeon at Morgan Stanley Hospital in Manhattan, used a novel technique to operate on a two-week-old baby with congenital heart defects (CHD). Ordinarily, surgery to repair complicated heart deformations would require opening up the patient’s chest and stopping the heart just to study the defects of that specific heart before they can even begin repairing it.

Each heart with CHD has its own set of holes, and with non-invasive imaging techniques it’s difficult to map out exactly what will need to be fixed during surgery. Dr. Bacha and his team took MRI images of the baby’s heart and used them to create a 3D map of the organ. They then studied it in detail and practiced on the 3D printed replica. They knew exactly what to do before they even began the operation.

Dr. Bacha described the 3D printed heart as a “road map” repairing the maze that was the abnormal heart. Rather than opening up the chest to study the heart and then later performing a second operation to repair it, they were able to accomplish the life-saving surgery in just one operation. This type of achievement is just one example of how 3D printing is already changing the world. For the tiny patient’s family, the ready availability of 3D printing technology literally changed their lives forever.

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