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In recent years, updates in 3D printing technologies have allowed medical researchers to print things that were not possible to make using the previous version of this technology, including food, medicine, and even body parts.

In 2018, doctors from the Ontario Veterinary College 3D printed a custom titanium plate for a dog that had lost part of its skull after cancer surgery.

face_with_colon_three circa 2018.

Meagan Moore, a Biological and Agricultural Engineering student from Louisiana State University (LSU) has 3D printed a full-size model of the human body for use in radiotherapy.

Such models used in radiotherapy mimic the human tissue, and in medical terms are known as imaging phantoms or phantoms. They are used in radiotherapy to estimate the amount of dose delivery and distribution. A customized phantom of a patient can make the whole process more precise.

Continue reading “Louisiana State University 3D prints full-body ‘human’ for radiotherapy” »

Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

A company recently developed a novel system capable of printing biological tissue in a blindingly fast 30 seconds. Ultimately, this new method could, one day, help bring an end to diabetes, according to a blog post shared on the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne’s (EPFL’s) official website.

Continue reading “Meet The Bioprinted Pancreas That Could End Diabetes” »

DNA — nicknamed “nature’s storage medium” — has accurately stored the instruction sets for all life on Earth for billions of years. But it also may hold the keys to managing explosive data growth and storing archival data for generations to come.

The idea of storing digital data in DNA dates back more than a half century, but making it a reality has accelerated in recent years with advances in biotechnology and declining costs of genome sequencing.

Dave Landsman is the senior director of industry standards and a distinguished engineer at Western Digital. For the past two years, he’s been one of the principals in the company’s exploration of DNA data storage.

The idea of human ectogenesis — growing a baby in an artificial environment outside of the human body — has always been considered in the realms of science fiction, however it may not be for much longer.

Scientific developments in this field have been taking big steps forward in recent years, particularly in our ability to care for extremely preterm babies. However, just how close are we to being able to create human life entirely outside of the human body? And in a potential future, where women no longer had to give birth, what societal impacts might that have on gender equality and our conceptions of what it means to be a mother?

Continue reading “What if women never had to give birth again?” »

Guarding Against Future Global Biological Risks — Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD — Chair Nuclear Threat Initiative, bio Advisory Group; Commissioner, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense; former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD is an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, who currently serves as chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) bio Advisory Group (https://www.nti.org/about/people/margaret-hamburg-md/), where she has also served as founding vice president and senior scientist. She also currently holds a role as Commissioner on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/margaret-a-hamburg/).

Continue reading “Dr. Peggy Hamburg, MD — Chair, Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), bio Advisory Group” »

Experts say teplizumab marks a “new era” in treatment, tackling the root cause of the condition for the first time, rather than just the symptoms.

It works by reprogramming the immune system to stop it mistakenly attacking pancreatic cells which produce insulin.

It is likely to pave the way for approval decisions in other countries.

Continue reading “Game-changing type 1 diabetes drug approved in US” »

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that the safe operation of a negative pressure room—a space in a hospital or biological research laboratory designed to protect outside areas from exposure to deadly pathogens—can be disrupted by an attacker armed with little more than a smartphone.

According to UCI cyber-physical systems security experts, who shared their findings with attendees at the Association for Computing Machinery’s recent Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Los Angeles, mechanisms that control airflow in and out of biocontainment facilities can be tricked into functioning irregularly by a sound of a particular frequency, possibly tucked surreptitiously into a popular song.

“Someone could play a piece of music loaded on their smartphone or get it to transmit from a television or other audio device in or near a negative pressure room,” said senior co-author Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “If that music is embedded with a tone that matches the resonant frequency of the pressure controls of one of these spaces, it could cause a malfunction and a leak of deadly microbes.”

Scientists from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Osaka University introduced a method for manufacturing complex microrobots driven by chemical energy using in situ integration. By 3D-printing and assembling the mechanical structures and actuators of microrobots inside a microfluidic chip, the resulting microrobots were able to perform desired functions, like moving or grasping. This work may help realize the vision of microsurgery performed by autonomous robots.

As medical technology advances, increasingly complicated surgeries that were once considered impossible have become reality. However, we are still far away from a promised future in which microrobots coursing through a patient’s body can perform procedures, such as microsurgery or cancer cell elimination.

Continue reading “3D-printing microrobots with multiple component modules inside a microfluidic chip” »