health advances Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Four Advances That Could Change Tuberculosis Treatment

The AHA! Team — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 05:47:50 +0000

American Chemical Society via EurekAlert! – As of early 2025, tuberculosis cases are increasing in the U.S. As of early 2025, tuberculosis cases are increasing in the U.S. This disease, often shortened to TB, causes significant lung damage and, if not treated, is almost always lethal. World TB Day on March 24 raises awareness about the disease and commemorates Robert Koch’s discovery of the source bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. More than a century later, scientists continue refining TB diagnosis methods and treatment strategies, some of which are in these four ACS journal articles. Reporters can request free access to these papers by emailing newsroom@acs.org. 1. Fluorescence for a faster TB diagnosis. Currently, testing saliva samples for M. tuberculosis is time-consuming because of the bacterium’s slow growth and resistance to stains used in imaging. To develop a faster method, researchers targeted a protein that the bacterium uses to steal iron ions from its host’s cells. In a study published in ACS Central Science, the team explains how to label the iron-transporter protein with a fluorescent tag, which turns on after releasing the iron inside the M. tuberculosis cells. In separate tests on saliva from 11 people diagnosed with TB, the fluorescence technique identified infectious levels of the bacterium within 10 minutes. 2. White blood cell-focused M. tuberculosis therapy. A type of white blood cell called a macrophage gets taken over during a tuberculosis infection, becoming an incubator for the pathogen. So, researchers report in ACS Infectious Diseases that they have developed sugar-coated nanoparticles that get absorbed by infected macrophages. And once inside, the nanoparticles interrupted critical cellular pathways and prompted the damaged cells to be recycled. In infected mice, 6 weeks of nanoparticle treatment significantly reduced the amount of M. tuberculosis in the lungs. 3. A potential nasal treatment for tuberculous meningitis. If M. tuberculosis reaches cerebrospinal fluid, the result can be tuberculous meningitis — a life-threatening inflammation around a person’s brain and spinal cord. To get the TB drug clofazimine across the blood-brain barrier, researchers have encapsulated it inside tiny particles and created a nasal spray. According to their study in ACS infectious Diseases, the spray didn’t adversely affect mice with tuberculous meningitis. A 4-week treatment significantly reduced the bacterial burden within the animals’ brains and lungs compared to untreated mice. 4. Light-activated particles inactivate bacteria. Many new TB cases are multidrug resistant. So, a research team wanted to improve treatment efficacy and reduce the risk of further antimicrobial resistance by creating a photoreactive therapy. They encapsulated light-activated particles inside nanometer-wide spheres. When the nanospheres were injected into mice, red laser light triggered the particles to produce reactive oxygen species that inactivated Mycobacterium marinum, a bacterium that causes TB-like illness in fish. The initial animal study results are published in ACS Omega. Additionally in March 2025, ACS Webinars and ACS Publications co-hosted a virtual event, “Disrupt & Destroy: Starving Tuberculosis with Smarter Science,” about innovative drug strategies and cutting-edge TB research. The webinar is available to watch on demand. ### Journal ACS Central Science To read the original article click here.

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New Biodegradable Adhesive Offers Safer Alternative for Knee Meniscus Repair

The AHA! Team — Wed, 21 May 2025 05:40:28 +0000

Taipei Medical University via News-Medical – Prof. Jia-Lin Wu’s research team from Taipei Medical University, Taiwan, has developed an advanced biodegradable tissue adhesive to repair torn knee menisci. This innovative adhesive offers a safer and more effective alternative to traditional sutures, paving the way for improved recovery and reduced surgical complications for millions of patients. Natural polymers improve meniscus repair with biodegradable adhesive Meniscus tears, a common knee injury for athletes and older adults, are often treated with sutures that can damage healthy tissue and lead to poor healing. The newly developed adhesive, called ChitHCl-DDA, is made from natural polymers (chitosan and dextran) and demonstrates high adhesive strength, biocompatibility, and biodegradability, making it ideal for meniscus repair. This advancement can improve outcomes for athletes, older adults, and others who face this common injury, as well as reduce the burden on healthcare systems. ChitHCl-DDA: Strong, biocompatible, and designed for seamless healing The ChitHCl-DDA adhesive exhibits strong adhesion and biocompatibility, forming a durable bond with meniscus tissue even in wet environments while supporting natural healing without harmful side effects. It promotes tissue regeneration by encouraging cell migration and collagen formation, which is essential for effective recovery. Designed for controlled degradation, the adhesive provides mechanical support during healing and gradually disappears as the tissue regenerates. Laboratory and animal studies demonstrated its effectiveness, showing significant improvements in tissue healing, reduced extrusion, and enhanced regeneration compared to untreated controls. “Our innovative ChitHCl-DDA adhesive not only bonds strongly in challenging wet conditions but also actively promotes natural tissue regeneration—paving the way for a less invasive and more efficient approach to meniscus repair,” said Prof. Wu. Rigorous testing behind ChitHCl-DDA’s success The research team synthesized the adhesive using chitosan hydrochloride and oxidized dextran, forming a gel-like material that bonds through a chemical reaction. This adhesive sets quickly (2-5 minutes), ensuring it remains in place during surgery. It was tested rigorously for strength, swelling, and biocompatibility, using advanced techniques like Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy and rheological analysis. The adhesive was also tested successfully on porcine and rabbit models to confirm its real-world applicability. This new adhesive could reduce reliance on sutures and associated complications, providing a less invasive and more effective solution for meniscus repair. Beyond orthopedics, the technology may inspire further applications in tissue repair and regenerative medicine, impacting various medical fields. Source: Taipei Medical University Journal reference: Wong, P.-C., et al. (2024). Injectable ChitHCl-DDA tissue adhesive with high adhesive strength and biocompatibility for torn meniscus repair and regeneration. International Journal of Biological Macromolecules. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2024.132409. To read the original article click here.

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The AI Tech That Can Spot Serious Illness Before the Doctor

The AHA! Team — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 06:16:00 +0000

John Jeffay via Israel21c – Lavaa Health’s platform can identify disease and hard-to-diagnose illnesses at the earliest stage, allowing doctors to quickly draw up efficient treatment plans. Meet your GP’s new best friend – artificial intelligence (AI). Lavaa Health, an Israeli startup, watches over all patient data, ready to spot early signs of potential health issues, and uses its vast medical database to identify hard-to-diagnose or rare illnesses. It’s a virtual assistant that works in the background to offer help and alerts, but leaves the physician very much in the driver’s seat, from making the diagnosis to drawing up a treatment plan. The company was founded after a family tragedy. Adam Amitai, Lavaa’s CEO, watched helplessly as his 55-year-old mother-in-law succumbed to ovarian cancer. It had taken a year for the doctors to correctly diagnose her, by which time it was too late. She died eight months later. Amitai doesn’t blame the physicians and says they provided excellent care. But he realized they weren’t exploiting the power of AI to get quicker and more accurate insights. And so he interviewed 200 physicians in the United States, to fully understand how AI could best help them. And he drew on his seven years’ experience as an “offensive cyber officer” in the IDF – where a key challenge was sifting vital details from masses of data. Amitai had also continued to work in intelligence afterwards and had set up an automated trading platform for institutional investors. So, he wasn’t from the world of healthcare, but he recognized that it could benefit from advanced systems that had been developed elsewhere. Handling data more efficiently “I understood there was a big problem with data handling in the healthcare industry,” he tells ISRAEL21c. He saw it when each of his three children were born. Every time, the doctor asked for the family’s medical history. And he saw it with the death of his mother-in-law. He believes AI would have suggested ovarian cancer as a diagnosis much sooner. The main problem is in primary care, the people who are in charge of your health on a daily basis “It’s not the physician’s fault, it’s not the care team fault, they’re doing their best, but they just don’t have the tools,” he says. “The main problem is in primary care, the people who are in charge of your health on a daily basis. They’re reactive instead of proactive. They’re trying to solve a single problem, not your whole health.” And they generally lack the resources to understand what the problem is and to diagnose it correctly. Lavaa’s AI-powered Preventive Care Engine Platform assists the physician by offering evidence-based insights. “We are not allowing the computer to try to automatically detect the conditions. We’re using the accepted worldwide care protocols, but we’re using AI to extract the data,” says Amitai. “Physicians cannot go through all of this data by themselves in the amount of time that they have. It’s just impossible, so this is giving them a huge backup. “The number of parameters for a physician to check and the number of possible diseases is infinite, and time is limited. But computers are really good at matching parameters to diseases. “I realized that technology from the intelligence world already did this, so it was a question of applying it to healthcare.” Prevention, intervention Lavaa is all about prevention and early intervention. Its AI platform can generate questions for a particular patient based on what it sees in their records. It may, for example, ask if a female patient remembers the age at which she had her first period – something that’s relevant for breast cancer, but is never recorded in an EMR (electronic medical record). Or it may send targeted messages, questionnaires, or notifications. It acts as an early warning system, designed to prevent the development of chronic or psychological diseases, and cancer. Lavaa currently looks after over 700,000 patients, all in the US, though the company has plans to expand globally. Amitai estimates the technology has so far saved 1,500 lives. “These are people who had a condition that could have been terminal but caught it on time and we managed to alert the physician, which meant the patients got either the right or better drugs, and better treatment, or a referral to the right place,” he says. Lavaa is not the only such AI solution, but Amitai says the healthcare market is big enough for everybody. Some other companies use AI to both inform and to diagnose – unlike Lavaa – or as a “black box” providing a diagnosis but no explanation of its “thinking.” The company has 12 staff members at its offices in Ra’anana, central Israel, and a team working in the US. Lavaa was founded in 2021, has attracted $5 million in investments. A Series A funding round will be launched later this year. “We want to go global,” Amitai says. “Our solution can work anywhere, and we believe it can improve healthcare around the world.” For more information, click here. To read the original article click here.

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Soft, Stretchy ‘Jelly Batteries’ Inspired by Electric Eels

The AHA! Team — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:12:50 +0000

University of Cambridge via EurekAlert! – Researchers have developed soft, stretchable ‘jelly batteries’ that could be used for wearable devices or soft robotics, or even implanted in the brain to deliver drugs or treat conditions such as epilepsy. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, took their inspiration from electric eels, which stun their prey with modified muscle cells called electrocytes. Like electrocytes, the jelly-like materials developed by the Cambridge researchers have a layered structure, like sticky Lego, that makes them capable of delivering an electric current. The self-healing jelly batteries can stretch to over ten times their original length without affecting their conductivity The first time that such stretchability and conductivity has been combined in a single material. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances. The jelly batteries are made from hydrogels: 3D networks of polymers that contain over 60% water. The polymers are held together by reversible on/off interactions that control the jelly’s mechanical properties. The ability to precisely control mechanical properties and mimic the characteristics of human tissue makes hydrogels ideal candidates for soft robotics and bioelectronics; however, they need to be both conductive and stretchy for such applications. “It’s difficult to design a material that is both highly stretchable and highly conductive, since those two properties are normally at odds with one another,” said first author Stephen O’Neill, from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “Typically, conductivity decreases when a material is stretched.” “Normally, hydrogels are made of polymers that have a neutral charge, but if we charge them, they can become conductive,” said co-author Dr Jade McCune, also from the Department of Chemistry. “And by changing the salt component of each gel, we can make them sticky and squish them together in multiple layers, so we can build up a larger energy potential.” Conventional electronics use rigid metallic materials with electrons as charge carriers, while the jelly batteries use ions to carry charge, like electric eels. Jelly batteries use ions to carry charge, like electric eels The hydrogels stick strongly to each other because of reversible bonds that can form between the different layers, using barrel-shaped molecules called cucurbiturils that are like molecular handcuffs. The strong adhesion between layers provided by the molecular handcuffs allows for the jelly batteries to be stretched, without the layers coming apart and crucially, without any loss of conductivity. The properties of the jelly batteries make them promising for future use in biomedical implants, since they are soft and mould to human tissue. “We can customise the mechanical properties of the hydrogels so they match human tissue,” said Professor Oren Scherman, Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, who led the research in collaboration with Professor George Malliaras from the Department of Engineering. “Since they contain no rigid components such as metal, a hydrogel implant would be much less likely to be rejected by the body or cause the build-up of scar tissue.” In addition to their softness, the hydrogels are also surprisingly tough. They can withstand being squashed without permanently losing their original shape, and can self-heal when damaged. The researchers are planning future experiments to test the hydrogels in living organisms to assess their suitability for a range of medical applications. The research was funded by the European Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Oren Scherman is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. To read the original article click here.

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Microrobots Show Promise for Treating Tumors

The AHA! Team — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 07:00:00 +0000

California Institute of Technology via News Wise – “These micromotors can penetrate the mucus of the digestive tract and stay there for a long time. This improves medicine delivery,” Gao says. “But because they’re made of magnesium, they’re biocompatible and biodegradable.” Targeting medical treatment to an ailing body part is a practice as old as medicine itself. A Band-Aid is placed on a skinned knee. Drops go into itchy eyes. A broken arm goes into a cast. But often what ails us is inside the body and is not so easy to reach. In such cases, a treatment like surgery or chemotherapy might be called for. A pair of researchers in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science are working on an entirely new form of treatment–microrobots that can deliver drugs to specific spots inside the body while being monitored and controlled from outside the body. “The microrobot concept is really cool because you can get micromachinery right to where you need it,” says Lihong Wang, Caltech’s Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. “It could be drug delivery, or a predesigned microsurgery.” The microrobots are a joint research project of Wang and Wei Gao, assistant professor of medical engineering, and are intended for treating tumors in the digestive tract. The microrobots consist of microscopic spheres of magnesium metal coated with thin layers of gold and parylene, a polymer that resists digestion. The layers leave a circular portion of the sphere uncovered, kind of like a porthole. The uncovered portion of the magnesium reacts with the fluids in the digestive tract, generating small bubbles. The stream of bubbles acts like a jet and propels the sphere forward until it collides with nearby tissue. On their own, magnesium spherical microrobots that can zoom around might be interesting, but they are not especially useful. To turn them from a novelty into a vehicle for delivering medication, Wang and Gao made some modifications to them. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWK3gg6J8ng First, a layer of medication is sandwiched between an individual microsphere and its parylene coat. Then, to protect the microrobots from the harsh environment of the stomach, they are enveloped in microcapsules made of paraffin wax. At this stage, the spheres are capable of carrying drugs, but still lack the crucial ability to deliver them to a desired location. For that, Wang and Gao use photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT), a technique developed by Wang that uses pulses of infrared laser light. The infrared laser light diffuses through tissues and is absorbed by oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells, causing the molecules to vibrate ultrasonically. Those ultrasonic vibrations are picked up by sensors pressed against the skin. The data from those sensors is used to create images of the internal structures of the body. Previously, Wang has shown that variations of PACT can be used to identify breast tumors, or even individual cancer cells. With respect to the microrobots, the technique has two jobs. The first is imaging. By using PACT, the researchers can find tumors in the digestive tract and also track the location of the microrobots, which show up strongly in the PACT images. Once the microrobots arrive in the vicinity of the tumor, a high-power continuous-wave near-infrared laser beam is used to activate them. Because the microrobots absorb the infrared light so strongly, they briefly heat up, melting the wax capsule surrounding them, and exposing them to digestive fluids. At that point, the microrobots’ bubble jets activate, and the microrobots begin swarming. The jets are not steerable, so the technique is sort of a shotgun approach–the microrobots will not all hit the targeted area, but many will. When they do, they stick to the surface and begin releasing their medication payload. “These micromotors can penetrate the mucus of the digestive tract and stay there for a long time. This improves medicine delivery,” Gao says. “But because they’re made of magnesium, they’re biocompatible and biodegradable.” Tests in animal models show that the microrobots perform as intended, but Gao and Wang say they are planning to continue pushing the research forward. “We demonstrated the concept that you can reach the diseased area and activate the microrobots,” Gao says. “The next step is evaluating the therapeutic effect of them.” Gao also says he would like to develop variations of the microrobots that can operate in other parts of the body, and with different types of propulsion systems. Wang says his goal is to improve how his PACT system interacts with the microrobots. The infrared laser light it uses has some difficulty reaching into deeper parts of the body, but he says it should be possible to develop a system that can penetrate further. To read the original article click here.

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