Miracles and wonders: a new hand, zapping cancer

Tickling the ivories, digitally.

The real news in healthcare is coming out of the laboratories, not bureaucracies in Washington.

A research team from Georgia Tech has been working on a rehab glove that is already showing effectiveness for people with limited hand motor skills and proprioception due to spinal injury. The electronic Mobile Music Touch (MMT) glove works with a piano and vibrates individual fingers to point to which keys should be pressed. Using the MMT, people in the study practiced playing the piano for thirty minutes three times a week, and followed up with the glove but without the piano (air piano?), and saw considerable improvement at a time when traditional therapy is usually no longer effective.

Damaged and aged heart tissue of older heart failure patients was rejuvenated by stem cells modified by scientists. "Since patients with heart failure are normally elderly, their cardiac stem cells aren't very healthy," said Sadia Mohsin, Ph.D., one of the study authors and a post-doctoral research scholar at San Diego State University's Heart Institute in San Diego, Cal. "We modified these biopsied stem cells and made them healthier. It is like turning back the clock so these cells can thrive again."

Devising effective drugs is only half the battle faced by pharmaceutical companies. The other half is delivering them to the place in the body they are needed. Some researchers, therefore, are exploring an alternative: building tiny factories that make and release a drug precisely where it is needed. Among these investigators is Daniel Anderson, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And as he reports in Nano Letters, he and his colleagues have built a device which might do just that. Dr Anderson’s drugmaking machine is a simplified, artificial version of a living cell.

A new method of mapping people's DNA promises to make the procedure more accessible to patients and to help doctors zero in on gene mutations that may cause disease, according to a report Wednesday in the journal Nature. The latest advance in whole-genome sequencing requires only a small amount of DNA to produce a more complete picture of someone's genome, and to immediately determine whether a faulty gene is inherited from the mother, the father or both. That finding could be critical to interpreting results.

In a significant step forward for the development of a potential new cancer treatment, scientists have found how a common cold virus can kill tumors and trigger an immune response, like a vaccine, when injected into the blood stream. Researchers said that by hitching a ride on blood cells, the virus was protected from antibodies in the blood stream that might otherwise neutralize its cancer-fighting abilities. The findings suggest viral therapies like this, called reovirus, could be injected into the blood stream at routine outpatient appointments -- like standard chemotherapy -- making them potentially suitable for treating a range of cancers.