healthcare technology

The U.S. military is looking for candidates to receive face transplants. Over the past decade face transplant surgeries have been done in civilian hospitals, but it has been the U.S. Defense Department, with its obvious interest ...

Monitoring social media websites like Twitter could help health officials and providers identify in real time severe medical outbreaks, allowing them to more efficiently direct resources and curb the spread of disease, according to a San Diego State University studypublished last month in the Journal of Medical Internet Research,Medical News Today reports.

Study Details

For the study, lead researcher and San Diego State University geography professor Ming-Hsiang Tsou and his team used a program to monitor tweets that originated within a 17-mile radius of 11 cities. The program recorded details of tweets containing the words "flu" or "influenza," including:

• Origin;
• Username;
• Whether the tweet was an original or a retweet; and
• Any links to websites in the tweet.

Researchers then compared their findings with regional data based on CDC's definition of influenza-like illness.

Stars, diamonds, circles.

Rather than your average bowl of Lucky Charms, these are three-dimensional cell cultures that can be generated by a new digital microfluidics platform from researchers at U of T’s Institute for Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME).

Published this week in Nature Communications, the tool can be used to study cells in cost-efficient, three-dimensional microgels. This may hold the key to personalized medicine applications in the future.

“We already know that the microenvironment can greatly influence cell fate,” saidIrwin A. Eydelnant (IBBME PhD 1T3), recent doctoral graduate from IBBME and first author of the publication. “The important part of this study is that we’ve developed a tool that will allow us to investigate the sensitivity of cells to their 3D environment.”

“Everyone wants to do three-dimensional (3D) cell culture,” explained co-authorAaron Wheeler (IBBME), Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry at IBBME, the Department of Chemistry, and the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (DCCBR) at the University of Toronto.

“Cells grown in this manner share much more in common with living systems than the standard two-dimensional (2D) cell culture format.” But more naturalistic, 3D cell cultures are a challenge to grow.

more at http://www.engineering.utoronto.ca/About/Engineering_in_the_News/3D_Microgels__On-demand__Offer_New_Potential_for_Cell_Research__the_Future_of_Personalized_Medicine.htm