Category: Future Medicine

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this very short article, Genome News Network (GNN) looks at the work of a Brazilian researcher, Adriano Cavalcanti, and his colleagues. Cavalcanti is working in nanorobotics, an emerging field in medicine which states that nanorobots soon will travel inside our bodies, digging for information, finding defects or delivering drugs. The GNN article contains spectacular images, and Cavalcanti's page about Nanorobotics Control Design includes additional ones. Even if the computer-generated images are impressive, please notice that real uses of nanorobots for health care will only appear progressively within the next ten years. Finally, this summary contains more details and a third set of images of simulated nanorobots at work. [Additional note: I didn't flash about Cavalcanti's work when Nanodot wrote about it last July in Collective Nanorobots Control Design. Now, I think it's worth mentioning a second time.]"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers in the US are using old inkjet printers to produce sheets of human skin to be used on burn victims. The printer cartridges are filled with living cells that are printed one by one into skin tissue. They think that this 'skin-printing' method will minimize rejections by patients and reduce post-operative complications. In this article, the Wall Street Journal (paid registration needed) writes that while the technology is still in its early stages, it could be used clinically within two years. This could be a life-saving technology for the 20% of burn patients who have the most extensive burns. Considering that each year, some 45,000 people are hospitalized with burns in the U.S. alone, this 'skin-printing' method is a very useful advance in regenerative medicine. You'll find more details, previous references and an illustration in this overview."

Roland Piquepaille writes "An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) has discovered a new nanotechnology effect, the ability of moving water molecules by light. This is a far better way than current methods such as damaging electric fields and opens the way to a new class of microfluidic devices used in analytical chemistry and for pharmaceutical research. For example, this makes possible to design a device that can move drugs dissolved in water, or droplets of water and samples that need to be tested for environmental or biochemical analyses. Please read this overview for more details and references, plus an image of two water drops illuminated with a fluorescent dye and sitting respectively on a nanowire surface and on a flat surface."