For many who suffer from chronic migraines, nothing can reliably prevent or dull the debilitating headaches that may strike as often as every other day.
A biopharmaceutical company in Bothell, Washington, may have a solution. It hopes that a monthly injection of an antibody that blocks a well-known migraine-triggering protein will prevent these headaches.
The company, called Alder Biopharmaceuticals, is testing the efficacy of the drug in a clinical study of 160 patients, each of whom has between four and 14 migraines per month; Alder expects the results of the study to be in this fall.
Artificial retinas give the blind only the barest sense of what’s visible, but researchers are working hard to improve that.
Elias Konstantopoulos gets spotty glimpses of the world each day for about four hours, or for however long he leaves his Argus II retina prosthesis turned on. The 74-year-old Maryland resident lost his sight from a progressive retinal disease over 30 years ago, but is able to perceive some things when he turns on the bionic vision system.
Although no medical cure currently exists for spinal cord injury, paralyzed patients in the future could be able to walk again thanks to robotic exoskeleton technology, being developed all around the world. A team of Belgian researchers is working on a mind-controlled variant called Mindwalker, a system that converts electroencephalography (EEG) signals from the brain, or electromyography (EMG) signals from shoulder muscles, into electronic commands to control the exoskeleton.
The Mindwalker project (also known as: Mind-controlled orthosis and VR-training environment for walk empowering) is a three-year initiative supported by 2.75 million euros in funding from the European Commission. The ultimate goal of the project is to help paralyzed people who spend their lives in a wheelchair get back them on feet by bypassing the spinal cord entirely and routing brain signals to the robotic exoskeleton.
Designs extremely practical and find use in day-to-day life of people
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, and the biomedical engineeringstudents of Gayatri Vidya Parishad College of Engineering for Women have shown how true the idiom is. The students as part of their final-year project have developed twelve prototypes that can aid in healthcare. The students have developed the concept from scratch with the help of the faculty and have created working models of their innovative ideas. All the designs are extremely practical and find use in day-to-day life of people not only undergoing medical treatment but in diagnosis and the lives of the disabled as well.
Here s another example of technological excellence for a social cause- a smartphone for visual impaired persons and that too invented by an Indian.
It is no more just taking calls and answering them but whole lot of functions including the one that enable the blinds to read and send the texts based on Braille system developed long time back. But its digital version is something that can revolutionize this pattern.
The device developed by Sumit Dagar whose company located in IIM Ahmedabad campus has a touch screen which can elevate and depress the contents allowing such persons to read and send texts.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have succeeded in transforming skin cells directly into oligodendrocyte precursor cells, the cells that wrap nerve cells in the insulating myelin sheaths that help nerve signals propagate.
The current research was done in mice and rats. If the approach also works with human cells, it could eventually lead to cell therapies for diseases like inherited leukodystrophies — disorders of the brain’s white matter — and multiple sclerosis, as well as spinal cord injuries. The study was published online April 14 inNature Biotechnology.
