Drexel University researchers are one step closer to offering a new treatment for the millions of patients who suffer from slow-healing, chronic wounds. The battery-powered applicator — as small and light as a watch — is the first portable and potentially wearable device to heal wounds with low-frequency ultrasound.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the research team an estimated $3 million to test the therapy on 120 patients over the next five years. By using diagnostic monitoring of blood flow in the wound tissue, the clinical trial will also determine how nutrition and inflammation impact wound closure, making treatment customization a possibility.
The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing and Health Professions.
Today we’re joined by Melodie Yashar — Designer, Researcher, Technologist, co-founder of the firm Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+), Senior Research Associate with San Jose State University Research Foundation at NASA Ames Research Center, and an Associate Researcher within the UC Davis Center for Human/Robotics/Vehicle Integration and Performance (HRVIP). She also teaches undergraduate and graduate design at Art Center College of Design and is a 2019–2020 Future Space Leaders Fellow.
Melodie’s current work focuses on the relationship of advanced software & hardware systems for spaceflight and maintains ongoing research interests in the design of augmented environments, human-machine interaction, human performance studies, and space technology development.
As an undergraduate Melodie studied at UC Berkeley and at Art Center, and she holds graduate degrees in architecture and human-computer interaction with an emphasis in robotics from Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University, respectively.
She also served as a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute, as a researcher within Carnegie Mellon’s Morphing Matter Lab and Design Director of Sonic Platforms.
Having come from an interdisciplinary background, Melodie appreciates those who see research and design as a confluence of different fields—allowing problem solving to become a more thoroughly collaborative exercise.
Coronaviruses are enveloped, positive-stranded RNA viruses with a genome of approximately 30 kb. Based on genetic similarities, coronaviruses are classified into three groups. Two group 2 coronaviruses, human coronavirus OC43 (HCoV-OC43) and bovine coronavirus (BCoV), show remarkable antigenic and genetic similarities. In this study, we report the first complete genome sequence (30,738 nucleotides) of the prototype HCoV-OC43 strain (ATCC VR759). Complete genome and open reading frame (ORF) analyses were performed in comparison to the BCoV genome. In the region between the spike and membrane protein genes, a 290-nucleotide deletion is present, corresponding to the absence of BCoV ORFs ns4.9 and ns4.8. Nucleotide and amino acid similarity percentages were determined for the major HCoV-OC43 ORFs and for those of other group 2 coronaviruses. The highest degree of similarity is demonstrated between HCoV-OC43 and BCoV in all ORFs with the exception of the E gene. Molecular clock analysis of the spike gene sequences of BCoV and HCoV-OC43 suggests a relatively recent zoonotic transmission event and dates their most recent common ancestor to around 1890. An evolutionary rate in the order of 4 × 10−4 nucleotide changes per site per year was estimated. This is the first animal-human zoonotic pair of coronaviruses that can be analyzed in order to gain insights into the processes of adaptation of a nonhuman coronavirus to a human host, which is important for understanding the interspecies transmission events that led to the origin of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak.
Coronaviruses are large (120- to 160-nm), roughly spherical particles with a linear, nonsegmented, capped, and polyadenylated positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome that is encapsidated in a helical nucleocapsid. The envelope is derived from intracellular membranes and contains a characteristic crown of widely spaced club-shaped spikes that are 12 to 24 nm long. The genus Coronavirus (International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses database [ICTVdb], virus code 03.019.0.1) belongs to the family Coronaviridae in the order Nidovirales (7, 8).
Before the 2002-to-2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, coronaviruses were somewhat neglected in human medicine, but they have always been of considerable importance in animal health. Coronaviruses infect a variety of livestock, poultry, and companion animals, in whom they can cause serious and often fatal respiratory, enteric, cardiovascular, and neurologic diseases (25). Most of our understanding about the molecular pathogenic properties of coronaviruses has been achieved by the veterinary virology community.
Exciting momentum!! — Home Depot Founder, Bernie Marcus (age 91), and the Adolph Coors Foundation (beer family), putting millions of $$$ into comprehensive integrative health and wellness — Good to see the trend!!
The Marcus Institute of Integrative Health was established in Philadelphia in 2017 by Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, and a multi-million $$$ grant from the Marcus Foundation (headed by it’s Chairman, Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of The Home Depot) to expand the research, education and clinical care profile of Jefferson’s integrative medicine program, and to set the international standard of excellence in evidence-based, patient-centered integrative care.
The institute features a novel curriculum focusing on the clinical applications of integrative medicine with an emphasis on functional biochemistry, nutrient-based therapies, mind-body neuroscience, novel mechanisms of healing and emerging therapies.
Dr. Daniel Monti, MD, MBA is the Founding Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health — Jefferson Health. He is also Professor and Founding Chair of the historic, first-ever Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences, Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University.
Dr. Monti received his MD from The State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine. His Postdoctoral work was in the Research Scholars Program, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, at Jefferson Medical College.
Dr. Monti works closely with his colleagues in the institute and department to continuously expand, refine, and define Integrative Medicine at Jefferson, including innovative clinical programs of excellence, cutting edge medical education, and world-class research. Dr. Monti has dozens of journal publications, international presentations, and media appearances.
He’s also an accomplished author with books including: “Integrative Psychiatry and Brain Health” (Weil Integrative Medicine Library) and “The Great Life Makeover: Weight, Mood, and Sex”.
His newest book, “Tapestry of Health: Weaving Wellness into Your Life Through the New Science of Integrative Medicine”, which was co-written with Dr. Anthony J. Bazzan, was just released in August 2020.
The most expedient way to produce the algorithms you need for a new class of computer that works like the brain, its engineers are discovering, is through a Darwinian exercise in natural selection.
After controlling for various factors — such as participants’ age, sex, smoking status and activity level — the researchers found that taking glucosamine/chondroitin every day for a year or longer was associated with a 39 percent reduction in all-cause mortality.
It was also linked to a 65 percent reduction in cardiovascular-related deaths. That’s a category that includes deaths from stroke, coronary artery disease and heart disease, the United States’ biggest killer.” “He explains that because this is an epidemiological study — rather than a clinical trial — it doesn’t offer definitive proof that glucosamine/chondroitin makes death less likely. But he does call the results “encouraging.””.
Glucosamine supplements may reduce overall mortality about as well as regular exercise does, according to a new epidemiological study from West Virginia University.
“Does this mean that if you get off work at five o’clock one day, you should just skip the gym, take a glucosamine pill and go home instead?” said Dana King, professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine, who led the study. “That’s not what we suggest. Keep exercising, but the thought that taking a pill would also be beneficial is intriguing.”
He and his research partner, Jun Xiang — a WVU health data analyst — assessed data from 16,686 adults who completed the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2010. All of the participants were at least 40 years old. King and Xiang merged these data with 2015 mortality figures.
MHRA will only become fully independent on 1 January 2021, following Brexit, but U.K. regulations allow it to grant authorizations on an emergency basis. The United Kingdom has bought 40 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine—enough for 20 million people—and health secretary Matt Hancock today announced the first 800,000 doses will be available next week. The rollout will prioritize health workers as well as the elderly and other vulnerable populations, but the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has yet to offer its final guidance on the exact priorities.
Russia on 11 August allowed its COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, to be used on certain groups of people, and China has granted emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for several vaccines and has already vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people with them. A few other countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, have issued an EUA for one of the Chinese vaccines, produced by Sinopharm.
The Pfizer vaccine, whose key ingredient is messenger RNA that encodes the spike protein of the pandemic coronavirus, was found to have 95% efficacy, a clinical trial measurement of effectiveness, in a phase III trial in 43,000 people. But it presents logistical challenges for a widescale and rapid rollout, as it requires storage at −70°C. The lesser demands of other vaccines—including a candidate developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca—mean they will likely still play an important role in providing vaccinations for the whole U.K. population—and for global coverage, according to Michael Head, a global health researcher at the University of Southampton, “but, for now, this is wonderful news to wake up to.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) has solved one of biology’s grand challenges: predicting how proteins curl up from a linear chain of amino acids into 3D shapes that allow them to carry out life’s tasks. Today, leading structural biologists and organizers of a biennial protein-folding competition announced the achievement by researchers at DeepMind, a U.K.-based AI company. They say the DeepMind method will have far-reaching effects, among them dramatically speeding the creation of new medications.
Shockingly, Carroll notes that if our own Earth had formed just one percent farther away from the Sun, it would have suffered a runaway glaciation. By contrast, one percent further in and Earth would have suffered a runaway greenhouse and the fate that befell present-day Venus. “The habitable zone is a planetary tightrope,” writes Carroll.
However, the book does cover the possibility that super-earths and/or gas giant planets that lie in their parent stars’ habitable zones might also harbor planet-sized moons. As the book notes, it’s an idea that Hollywood director James Cameron’s embraced in his ground-breaking movie “Avatar.”
“Envisioning Exoplanets” also offers the reader capsule summaries of the various detection techniques that astronomers have used through the years to remotely explore and characterize these far-flung worlds.
