Medical Devices & Diagnostics
Articles
Breath Biopsies
A Breath Of Fresh Air For Diagnostics In the scary world of serious illness, early detection is crucial. The sooner someone knows he has cancer or rheumatoid arthritis, for example, the sooner he can get started with treatment. Early detection means a greater...
An Epigenetic Liquid Biopsy
A New Type of Liquid Biopsy Biopsy. It can bring to mind painful cutting, punching and poking. Thankfully, these important and potentially life-saving procedures have moved into the new millennium along with the rest of us. Liquid biopsies have become a hot area of...
Papa’s Got a Brand New Lab Coat
Papa’s Got a Brand New Lab Coat Last month, Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, NJ) announced the winners of its “Lab Coat of the Future” competition. This contest challenged participants to combine new technology and good design to transform the age-old...
Cancer Diagnostic In A Drop
THE LATEST IN CANCER DIAGNOSTICS Hearing the words “it might be cancer” paired with your doctor’s perplexed look is enough to send shock waves through your body. Getting to the heart of a diagnosis usually requires a surgical biopsy—removal and examination of...
Bye-Bye Opioids? Introducing Electroceuticals
MEDICINE-FREE PAIN MANAGEMENT Migraine relief without drugs? No “digestive issues” due to pain meds after surgery? Better still, no worry about addiction after that appendectomy or hip replacement? Sounds a bit science-fictiony, does it not? The news reminds us nearly...
Picturing Disease
USING MEDICAL IMAGING TO INVESTIGATE DISEASE Medical imaging — using various modalities to take a snapshot of the body's interior structure — has been around since 1895, with the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen. X-rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation...
Unpacking Digital Medicine
CAN APPS PROGRAM BETTER HEALTH? Digital medicine is defined by the field’s pioneer Dr. Eric Tool of the Scripps Translational Science Institute (La Jolla, CA) as “the ability to digitize human beings, by a variety of means (sequencing, sensors, imaging, etc.), fully...
The Emerging Proteomics Market
Picking Apart The Protein Genomics continues to be all the rage in biotech circles—with special kudos to Illumina's (San Diego, CA) recent ability to obtain an entire human genome sequence in 24-hours for a mere thousand dollars. Our overall understanding of human DNA...
Finding Footprints: Nucleosome Diagnostics
New Player In Cancer Biomarker Detection Catching a tumor's first footprints is the holy grail of cancer research. The ability to detect and treat cancer early would put the collective mind of humanity at ease. Our best bet yet is the liquid biopsy—a minimally...
Detecting A Silent Killer: Sudden Cardiac Arrest
Getting To The Heart Of Sudden Cardiac Arrest Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) doesn't discriminate against anyone. From healthy to unhealthy, young to old, the unexpected cessation happens in an instant. Affecting more than 325,000 people per year with a 90% fatality...
Catching The First Drop Of Cancer
The Latest In Cancer Diagnostics Hearing the words "it might be cancer" paired with your doctor's perplexed look is enough to send shockwaves through your body. Getting to the heart of a diagnosis usually requires a surgical biopsy—removal and examination of the...
The Powered Exoskeleton
THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE BODY Last WEEKLY's focus on Duchenne muscular dystrophy got us to thinking, what products are available for those with limited mobility? A new type of medical device called a powered exoskeleton certainly caught our eye. Originally conceived as...
What The Heck Is qRT-PCR Diagnostics?
From Impossible to possible The genetics of cancer has progressed from the impossible to a multifaceted mountain of possible. Comprehensive projects in whole genome sequencing and tumor genome sequencing are providing data to unravel the genetic predispositions of...
The Rise Of Nanomedicine
Biotech Teams Up with Nanotech Imagine swallowing a pill containing microscopic magnets. After these “magnetic nanoparticles” make their way to the stomach, they are absorbed into the bloodstream to uncover disease associated proteins and other...
Capturing Circulating Tumor Cells
After using diagnostic technology to establish the existence of cancer, determining the severity is the next step toward developing a game plan. If metastasis is in the picture, strengthening your defensive line-up is a must. The dissemination of circulating tumor...