Researchers have developed a novel fuel cell implant for type 1 diabetes that can successfully produce and release insulin when triggered. New Atlas reports: The fuel cell itself, which resembles a teabag that’s slightly larger than a fingernail, is covered in a nonwoven fabric and coated with alginate, an algae-derived product used widely in biomedicine because of its high degree of biocompatibility. When implanted under the skin, the cell’s alginate soaks up body fluid, allowing glucose to permeate the surface and flow into the power center. Inside the cell, the team developed a copper-based nanoparticle anode that splits glucose into gluconic acid and a proton to generate an electric current. “Many people, especially in the Western industrialized nations, consume more carbohydrates than they need in everyday life,” [Martin Fussenegger from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich] said. “This gave us the idea of using this excess metabolic energy to produce electricity to power biomedical devices.

The fuel cell was then coupled with an insulin capsule featuring the team’s beta cells, which could be triggered to secrete insulin via electric current from the implant. Overall, the two components provide a self-regulating circuit. When the fuel cell powered by glucose senses excess blood sugar, it powers up. This then stimulates the beta cells to produce and secrete insulin. As blood sugar levels dip, it trips a threshold sensor in the fuel cell, so it powers down, in turn stopping the insulin production and release. This self-sustained circuit could also produce enough power to communicate with a device such as a smartphone, which allows for monitoring and adjusting, and even has potential for remote access for medical intervention. The study was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “has issued a health advisory to warn the public of an increase of a drug-resistant bacteria called Shigella,” reports CNN:

There are limited antimicrobial treatments available for these particular drug-resistant strains of Shigella and it’s also easily transmissible, warned the CDC in the Friday advisory. It’s also able to spread antimicrobial resistance genes to other bacteria that infect the intestines…. The CDC says patients will recover from shigellosis without any antimicrobial treatment and it can be managed with oral hydration, but for those who are infected with the drug-resistant strains there are no recommendations for treatment if symptoms become more severe. The percentage of infections from drug-resistant strains of the bacteria increased from zero in 2015 to 5% in 2022, according to the CDC.

Nationwide, there are nearly 3 million antimicrobial-resistant infections each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result, according to the CDC. A recent report by the United Nations said roughly 5 million deaths worldwide were associated with antimicrobial resistance in 2019 and the annual toll is expected to increase to 10 million by 2050 if steps are not taken to stop the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg, Apple’s quest to bring blood glucose monitoring to the Apple Watch is now at a “proof-of-concept stage.” The last remaining hurdle is for it to be made smaller. Engadget reports: The technology, which uses lasers to gauge glucose concentration under the skin, was previously tabletop sized but has reportedly advanced to the point where an iPhone-sized wearable prototype is in the works. The system would not only help people with diabetes monitor their conditions, but would ideally alert people who are prediabetic, the insiders say. They could then make changes that prevent Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes.

The project has supposedly been in development for a long time. It began in 2010, when an ailing Steve Jobs had his company buy blood glucose monitoring startup RareLight. Apple is said to have kept the effort secret by operating it as a seemingly isolated firm, Avolonte Health, but folded it into a previously unknown Exploratory Design Group (XDG). CEO Tim Cook, Apple Watch hardware lead Eugene Kim and other top leaders have been involved.

Any real-world product is likely years away, according to Bloomberg. The industry also doesn’t have a great track record of bringing no-prick monitors to market. In 2018, Alphabet’s health subsidiary Verily scrapped plans for a smart contact lens that would have tracked glucose using tears. Even major brands with vast resources aren’t guaranteed success, in other words, and it’s not clear how accurate Apple’s solution would be.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon on Wednesday said it had closed its $3.9 billion deal for primary care provider One Medical. Amazon agreed last July to acquire One Medical to deepen its presence in health care, and “dramatically improve” the experience of getting medical care. Amazon has long had ambitions to expand into health care, buying online pharmacy PillPack in 2018 for $750 million, then launching its own virtual clinic for chronic conditions, and prescription perks for Prime members. The deal gives Amazon access to One Medical’s more than 200 brick-and-mortar medical offices in 26 markets, and roughly 815,000 members.

The purchase was the first major deal announced since CEO Andy Jassy took the helm from founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021, and Jassy has indicated he sees health care as a major area of expansion. In a statement, he said health care is ripe for disruption, citing long appointment times and the complexities of primary care. “Customers want and deserve better, and that’s what One Medical has been working and innovating on for more than a decade,” Jassy said in a statement. “Together, we believe we can make the health care experience easier, faster, more personal, and more convenient for everyone.” Amazon said it would discount One Medical memberships for U.S. users to $144 from $199 for the first year, regardless of whether they’re a Prime subscriber.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Man goes to the doctor for a sleep apnea diagnosis, a few months later he gets a letter from the state of Maryland about his sleep apnea — and they won’t tell him how they found out about it,” writes Slashdot reader schwit1. NBC4 Washington reports: Dr. David Allick, a dentist in Rockville, was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea in June 2022. Months later, he received a letter from the MVA requesting additional information about his diagnosis in order “to determine your fitness to drive.” The September 2022 letter noted failure to return the required forms, which included a report from his physician, could result in the suspension of his license. Allick said he isn’t clear how the state learned about his medical diagnosis. But more importantly, he said he was previously unaware of a little-known Maryland law requiring people to report their sleep apnea diagnosis to state driving authorities. Allick said he still has questions about what prompted the ordeal. “Everybody I talked to — nobody’s heard of anything like this,” he said, also acknowledging: “I’m sure they want to keep the roads safe.” schwit1 adds: “How is this not a HIPAA violation?”

The investigation team at NBC4 Washington found that Allick is one of 1,310 people whose sleep apnea diagnoses “have led to medical reviews by the Maryland MVA.” The state department didn’t have data on how many of these Maryland drivers have had their license suspended.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“To date, about 500 people have been put in cryogenic stasis after legal death,” writes a Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, “with the majority of them in the U.S.

“But a few thousand more, including Emil Kendziorra, are on waiting lists, wearing bracelets or necklaces with instructions for emergency responders. ”

Kendziorra, 36, runs Berlin-based Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH, one of the first cryonics businesses in Europe to join a market dominated by American firms organizations like The Alcor Life Extension Foundation and The Cryonics Institute. The former cancer doctor has several hundred people on his firm’s waiting list. They skew to their late 30s, male and tend to work in technology. Patients can choose to have their entire body preserved and held upside down in a four-person dewars, a thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen, or just preserve their brain, which is cheaper.

Kendziorra says cryopreservation overall has become less expensive over the past few decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, a claim that he bases on historic prices published by his peers, who he says are making a collective effort to bring down costs. That could be critical to shifting cryonics from a fringe pursuit to something a little more mainstream, especially since it is no longer just for billionaires like PayPal Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel (who has reportedly signed up with Alcor). Kendziorra, for instance, has made cryonics just another monthly subscription by capitalizing on insurance, he told me during a Twitter Spaces discussion on cryonics last month. His customers pay a 25-euro ($26.54) monthly fee to Tomorrow Biostasis, and they also make the company the beneficiary of a minimum 100,000-euro life insurance payout upon their legal death. Kendziorra says that covers the full cost of cryonics including the biggest outlay: maintenance over the next century or so.

All told, most of his customers are paying about 50 euros a month for both the company’s subscription fee and the life insurance policy for the option of a long sleep at death. Of course, most companies don’t survive for more than a century, so Tomorrow Biostasis also partners with a non-profit group in Switzerland to carry out the storage of customers on its behalf…. The domain itself is largely funded by wealthy individuals including CEOs of tech companies, angel investors and scientists, Kendziorra says, adding that for them to invest in his own firm, their primary motivation shouldn’t be “monetary” but rather to help further the field.

The mechanics all sound sensible, but that still leaves the question of whether cryonics will work, medically speaking. Doctors and scientists have used words like quackery, pseudoscience and outright fraud to describe the field. Clive Cohen, a neuroscientist from Kings College London, has called it a “hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology.” The Association of Cryobiology has compared it to turning a hamburger back into a cow.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Askern Medical Practice, a general practitioner surgery based in Doncaster, UK, managed to muddle its Christmas holiday message to patients by texting them they’d been diagnosed with “aggressive lung cancer with metastases.” The message went out to patients of the medical facility — there are reportedly about 8,000 of them — on December 23, 2022. It asked patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which is used to help terminal patients expedite access to benefits because they may not have time for the usual bureaucratic delay.

About an hour after thoroughly alarming recipients of the not-so-glad tidings, the medical facility reportedly apologized in a follow-up text message. “Please accept our sincere apologies for the previous text message sent,” the message reads, as reported by the BBC. “This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read, ‘We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.’ In case of emergency please contact NHS 111.” On Tuesday, the surgery took its apology public via its Facebook page. The surgery characterized the errant text message as both an administrative error and a computer-related error, without clarifying just how the mistake occurred. “While no data was breached, we can confirm an admin staff error was made, for which we apologized immediately upon becoming aware,” Askern Medical Practice said in its post. “We would like to once again apologize sincerely to all patients for the distress caused. We take patient communication, confidentiality and data protection very seriously.”

“We also pride in looking after our patients,” the medical facility’s apology continued. “We would like to reassure all our patients that the text message was a mistake (it was an internal patient supportive task amongst admin staff to act upon) and not related to you as a patient in any way. This was an isolated computer-related error for which we are extremely regretful, and steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurrence.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“A teenage girl’s incurable cancer has been cleared from her body,” reports the BBC, “in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine….”

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used “base editing” to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year…. Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body…. The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago [which] allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa’s cancerous T-cells….

After a month, Alyssa was in remission and was given a second bone-marrow transplant to regrow her immune system…. Alyssa is just the first of 10 people to be given the drug as part of a clinical trial.
Her mother said that a year ago she’d been dreading Christmas, “thinking this is our last with her”. But it wasn’t.

And the BBC adds that applying the technology to cancer “only scratches the surface of what base editing could achieve…. There are already trials of base editing under way in sickle-cell disease, as well as high cholesterol that runs in families and the blood disorder beta-thalassemia.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from Syngenta Jealott’s Hill International Research Centre in the U.K., has developed a way to synthesize cocaine using a tobacco plant. The group describes how they synthesized the notorious drug and possible uses for their process in their paper published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In studying the coca plant, the researchers discovered that the cocaine that winds up in its leaves is not produced by elements in the plant converting 4-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl)-3-oxobutanoic acid to hyoscyamine, as has been thought. They found that it is instead produced by the two enzymes, EnMT4 and EnCYP81AN15. To prove their discovery, the group genetically engineered a tobacco plant to produce the two enzymes in its leaves, which resulted in the production of small amounts of cocaine (with assistance from a substance also produced in the plant called ornithine, which is similar to the precursor in the coca plant). […] Not mentioned in the paper is the possibility of synthesizing the two enzymes produced by both the coca and engineered tobacco plant as a more direct way to synthesize cocaine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. health regulators this week approved the first gene therapy for hemophilia, a $3.5 million one-time treatment for the blood-clotting disorder. From a report: The Food and Drug Administration cleared Hemgenix, an IV treatment for adults with hemophilia B, the less common form of the genetic disorder which primarily affects men. Currently, patients receive frequent, expensive IVs of a protein that helps blood clot and prevent bleeding. Drugmaker CSL Behring, based in Pennsylvania, announced the $3.5 million price tag shortly after the FDA approval, saying its drug would ultimately reduce health care costs because patients would have fewer bleeding incidents and need fewer clotting treatments.

According to a study cited by the National Library of Medicine, the price makes Hemgenix the most expensive medicine in the world, easily topping Novartis’ Zolgensma gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which costs right around $2 million per dose and is also a single-dose medicine. Like most medicines in the U.S., most of the cost of the new treatment will be paid by insurers, not patients, including private plans and government programs. After decades of research, gene therapies have begun reshaping the treatment of cancers and rare inheritable diseases with medicines that can modify or correct mutations embedded in people’s genetic code. Hemgenix is the first such treatment for hemophilia and several other drugmakers are working on gene therapies for the more common form of the disorder, hemophilia A.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.