Terapio: The Robopocalypse Comes for the CNA

Given the aging of the population and the low birthrate both in Japan and elsewhere, healthcare professionals are in short supply and unevenly distributed, giving rise to a need for alternatives to humans for performing simple tasks. Although increasing numbers of medical institutions have introduced electronic medical records, a variety of issues remain unresolved, such as the inconvenience of data recording and the high costs associated with data input.

The use of robots to support medical care data management and the delivery of resources at the medical front--thus allowing humans to concentrate on those tasks requiring knowledge, skill, and experience--is expected to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of healthcare services.

Now, researchers at Toyohashi Tech have developed "Terapio," a next-generation robot that replaces the conventional medical cart used by healthcare staff during their rounds in a hospital.

Terapio assists staff in delivering resources and recording round information with its friendly communication abilities.

Terapio is an autonomous mobile robot that can track a person. It uses a differential-drive steering system to provide both quiet operation and smooth omnidirectional mobility. It recognizes its environment and autonomously tracks a specified human while avoiding obstacles. Using the Terapio's ring-shaped power-assist handle, an operator can control the robot accurately by applying a slight force. Terapio can also record patients' personal and vital signs data and also display data, such as the patient's health records. In terms of its exterior design and color scheme, Terapio is suitable for use in medical institutions. The touch panel on the top of Terapio is used for operating the robot and inputting/displaying round data. It is designed such that the operator and patient can recognize the robot's status and actions by expressions shown on the display that change according to the robot's operation mode, which are "power assist," "tracking," and "rounds."

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Canadians Unleash Robopocalypse on our Genomes...Starting With Studying Autism

In the decade since the genome was sequenced in 2003, scientists and doctors have struggled to answer an all-consuming question: Which DNA mutations cause disease?

A new computational technique developed at the University of Toronto may now be able to tell us.

A Canadian research team led by professor Brendan Frey has developed the first method for 'ranking' genetic mutations based on how living cells 'read' DNA, revealing how likely any given alteration is to cause disease. They used their method to discover unexpected genetic determinants of autism, hereditary cancers and spinal muscular atrophy, a leading genetic cause of infant mortality.

Their findings appear in today's issue of the leading journal Science.

Think of the human genome as a mysterious text, made up of three billion letters. "Over the past decade, a huge amount of effort has been invested into searching for mutations in the genome that cause disease, without a rational approach to understanding why they cause disease," says Frey, also a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. "This is because scientists didn't have the means to understand the text of the genome and how mutations in it can change the meaning of that text." Biologist Eric Lander of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured this puzzle in his famous quote: "Genome. Bought the book. Hard to read."

What was Frey's approach? We know that certain sections of the text, called exons, describe the proteins that are the building blocks of all living cells. What wasn't appreciated until recently is that other sections, called introns, contain instructions for how to cut and paste exons together, determining which proteins will be produced. This 'splicing' process is a crucial step in the cell's process of converting DNA into proteins, and its disruption is known to contribute to many diseases.

Most research into the genetic roots of disease has focused on mutations within exons, but increasingly scientists are finding that diseases can't be explained by these mutations. Frey's team took a completely different approach, examining changes to text that provides instructions for splicing, most of which is in introns.

Frey's team used a new technology called 'deep learning' to teach a computer system to scan a piece of DNA, read the genetic instructions that specify how to splice together sections that code for proteins, and determine which proteins will be produced.

Unlike other machine learning methods, deep learning can make sense of incredibly complex relationships, such as those found in living systems in biology and medicine. "The success of our project relied crucially on using the latest deep learning methods to analyze the most advanced experimental biology data," says Frey, whose team included members from University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Faculty of Medicine and the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, as well as Microsoft Research and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "My collaborators and our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are world-leading experts in these areas."

Once they had taught their system how to read the text of the genome, Frey's team used it to search for mutations that cause splicing to go wrong. They found that their method correctly predicted 94 percent of the genetic culprits behind well-studied diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and colorectal cancer, but more importantly, made accurate predictions for mutations that had never been seen before.

They then launched a huge effort to tackle a condition with complex genetic underpinnings: autism spectrum disorder. "With autism there are only a few dozen genes definitely known to be involved and these account for a small proportion of individuals with this condition," says Frey.

In collaboration with Dr. Stephen Scherer, senior scientist and director of The Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids and the University of Toronto McLaughlin Centre, Frey's team compared mutations discovered in the whole genome sequences of children with autism, but not in controls. Following the traditional approach of studying protein-coding regions, they found no differences. However, when they used their deep learning system to rank mutations according to how much they change splicing, surprising patterns appeared.

"When we ranked mutations using our method, striking patterns emerged, revealing 39 novel genes having a potential role in autism susceptibility," Frey says.

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Glybera: The First Gene Therapy "Drug" Released in Europe

The Western world's first gene therapy drug is set to go on sale in Germany with a 1.1 million euro ($1.4 million) price tag, a new record for a medicine to treat a rare disease.

The sky-high cost of Glybera, from Dutch biotech firm UniQure and its unlisted Italian marketing partner Chiesi, shows how single curative therapies to fix faulty genes may upend the conventional pharmaceutical business model.

After a quarter century of experiments and several setbacks, gene therapy is finally throwing a life-line to patients by inserting corrective genes into malfunctioning cells - but paying for it poses a challenge.

The new drug fights an ultra-rare genetic disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD) that clogs the blood with fat. The medicine was approved in Europe two years ago but its launch was delayed to allow for the collection of six-year follow-up data on its benefits.

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Harvard, Wyss Institute Develop Spleen-like Device for Blood Cleansing

An extracorporeal blood-cleansing device for sepsis therapy

Authors:

Kang et al

Abstract:

Here we describe a blood-cleansing device for sepsis therapy inspired by the spleen, which can continuously remove pathogens and toxins from blood without first identifying the infectious agent. Blood flowing from an infected individual is mixed with magnetic nanobeads coated with an engineered human opsonin—mannose-binding lectin (MBL)—that captures a broad range of pathogens and toxins without activating complement factors or coagulation. Magnets pull the opsonin-bound pathogens and toxins from the blood; the cleansed blood is then returned back to the individual. The biospleen efficiently removes multiple Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, fungi and endotoxins from whole human blood flowing through a single biospleen unit at up to 1.25 liters per h in vitro. In rats infected with Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli, the biospleen cleared >90% of bacteria from blood, reduced pathogen and immune cell infiltration in multiple organs and decreased inflammatory cytokine levels. In a model of endotoxemic shock, the biospleen increased survival rates after a 5-h treatment.

Report: Thymus Regenerated in Old Mice

REGENERATIVE medicine—the idea that it is possible to renew old, worn-out tissue and thus keep a body going beyond the point when its organs start to fail—is an attractive idea. To that end, much effort has been put into creating and nurturing so-called pluripotent stem cells. These, when appropriately nudged, can be induced to turn into cells of any other type. They might thus be used for all sorts of repairs. Pluripotent cells, which once had to be extracted from embryos, can now be made routinely from body cells (skin cells, for example). Experiments are therefore going on to see if, when made from the cells of a particular individual, they might be used to repair damage to that person’s organs without (as a transplant from someone else would) attracting the attention of his immune system.

This approach is promising. It would be even better, though, if rather than having stem cells transplanted into it, a degenerate organ could be persuaded to repair itself. Until now, no one has managed to do this. But Clare Blackburn of Edinburgh University, in Britain, and her colleagues have succeeded. As they report in Development, they have treated, in mice, an organ called the thymus, which is a part of the immune system that runs down in old age. Instead of adding stem cells they have stimulated their animals’ thymuses to make more of a protein called FOXN1. This is a transcription factor (a molecular switch that activates genes), and for the thymus it turns out to be an elixir of life.

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Vaccines Without Needles

Using Financial Engineering to Develop New Medicines

Whoa. Endogenous Retroviruses (ERV) are Expressed by Folks With Multiple Sclerosis

its not really news.  But its news to me.

Read a lot over at ERV.