Microrobots for cell and drug delivery in the human body

A team of researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has developed a novel type of magnetic "micro-robot" capable of transporting cells and delivering drugs to specific locations inside the body. This new technology has the potential to revolutionise minimally invasive medical treatment such as targeted therapy and tissue regeneration.

The development of microrobots requires interdisciplinary knowledge including mechatronics, materials science, biology, computing and automation. These tiny devices have the potential to work in very small and confined spaces and thus have broad applications in many fields, but particularly in minimally invasive medical treatment.

Prof. Zhang Li, from CUHK's Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, collaborated with Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in Korea, and ETH Zurich. Together, they innovated a new microrobot capable of transporting the appropriate amount of cells and therapeutic drugs to specific areas of the body. The team used laser lithography to construct porous 3D scaffolds which were coated with a thin layer of magnetic material (nickel) and biocompatible material (titanium). This allowed remote manipulation of the devices using external magnetic fields to guide them, while causing no harm to living cells.

Prof. Zhang commented: "Our microrobots have enormous potential in on-demand, minimally invasive medical treatments. They allow accurate cell and drug delivery and reduce risk of complications arising from more invasive treatment methods. The low-strength magnetic fields are biologically harmless to living cells and tissues, and are therefore safe to use in the human body. This innovation is a great leap forward in the development of wirelessly-controlled medical microrobots."

One lab test involved cultivating human kidney cells in the microbot model, which grew and interacted with the model, Zhang said. This confirmed that the model could interoperate with the kidney cells, he said, adding that tests were currently conducted on rabbits and mice. This technology could lead to targeted treatment of various diseases such as cancer, cerebral infarction and retinal degeneration.

Professor Zhang is now leading the CUHK research team to improve the performance, intelligence and design of these micro-devices by paying close attention to their locomotion and dynamic properties in fluid. At present, they are just over 100 micrometres (µm) in length. However, as technology improves, they will become even smaller and more sophisticated. Experts believe that nano-scale robots may be possible by 2025 – able to repair individual cells and even work directly inside them. Further into the future, these machines could become a permanent part of our physiology.

The research results of this latest study will be featured as the cover story in a forthcoming issue of Advanced Materials.

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Google launches new company with aim to defeat aging

Google today announced Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being – in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Arthur D. Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer and a founding investor.

Announcing this new investment, Larry Page, Google CEO said: “Illness and aging affect all our families. With longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives. It’s impossible to imagine anyone better than Art — one of the leading scientists, entrepreneurs and CEOs of our generation — to take this new venture forward.”

“I’ve devoted much of my life to science and technology, with the goal of improving human health," Levinson commented. "Larry’s focus on outsized improvements has inspired me, and I’m tremendously excited about what’s next.”

Art Levinson will remain Chairman of Genentech and a director of Hoffmann-La Roche, as well as Chairman of Apple. Commenting on Art’s new role, Franz Humer, Chairman of Hoffmann-La Roche, said: “Art’s track record at Genentech has been exemplary, and we see an interesting potential for our companies to work together going forward. We’re delighted he’ll stay on our board.”

Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, said: “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.”

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Americans living longer, healthier lives

Overall, Americans today are living longer and more healthily than the previous generation, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind. There was a 3.8 year increase in average life expectancy during the last two decades, with quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) also increasing. However, there was a notable rise in anxiety among young and middle-aged people, beginning in 2001.

Thanks to medical advances, better treatments and new drugs not available a generation ago, the average American born today can expect to live 3.8 years longer than a person born two decades ago. Despite all these new technologies, however, is our increased life expectancy actually providing more active and healthy years of life? That question has remained largely unanswered – until now. In a first-of-its-kind study, the University of Massachusetts Medical School has found that the average 25-year-old American today can look forward to 2.4 more years of healthy life than 20 years ago while a 65-year-old today has gained 1.7 years.

Synthesising data from multiple government-sponsored health surveys conducted over the last 21 years, the researchers were able, for the first time, to measure how the quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of all Americans has changed over time. The study’s findings are described in a paper published yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health.

“QALE tells us more than how long a person can expect to live,” said Dr. Allison Rosen, associate professor of quantitative health sciences. “It tells us what the relative qualities of those added years are in terms of physical, emotional and mental well-being. Though many studies have measured this in different ways, this is really the first time we’ve been able to capture this type of information across the whole U.S. population over an extended period.”

Overall, the data shows that Americans are living longer, reporting fewer symptoms of disease, have more energy and show less impairment in everyday tasks than a generation ago. According to the study, a 25-year-old person today can expect to live 6 percent or 2.4 quality years longer than their 1987 counterpart. Meanwhile, a 65-year-old person will gain 1.7 quality years, a 14 percent increase from a generation ago.

Thanks to improvements in health care, many conditions are far more treatable today than 25 years ago, Rosen said. Heart disease, for instance, was potentially much more debilitating a generation ago and patients often suffered a decline in quality of life as a result. “Today, it is far less likely that a patient recovering from a heart attack will become institutionalised or need around-the-clock care the way they once might have,” Rosen said.

Today, Americans are more likely to see quality of life declines related to chronic, degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, while younger Americans appear to be experiencing problems related to a sedentary lifestyle. The authors also identified some troubling health trends. Among these was an increase in anxiety among young and middle-aged people, beginning in 2001. They also found that health gains made as a result of smoking cessation programs were being off-set, in part, by increases in obesity.

In the past, researchers have had a difficult time measuring population health beyond simple life expectancy because quality of life incorporates so many variables – physical well-being, mental health, pain, vitality, energy, emotional state – that it’s difficult to bring all these things together cohesively into a single number. Making it even more challenging, surveys measuring quality of life are rarely consistent with each other as they all define health and life quality differently.

Using multiple national surveys that asked Americans about their health in various ways over the last 21 years, Rosen and her colleagues solved this problem by identifying areas where the studies overlapped – allowing them to build a single, large data set that covered the entire adult population over more than two decades.

“Comprehensive measures of the overall health of the nation are practically non-existent,” said Rosen. “This study shows how existing national data can be used to systematically measure whether the population is getting healthier – not just living longer.”

As the Affordable Care Act (ACA) goes into effect from 2014–2020, the value of a single, consistent way of measuring improvements in health over a large population will be invaluable in assessing the impact of these pending changes, according to the authors.

“Having a consistent measure of population health represents a major advance in our ability to measure the impact of health care reform on the health – not just the health care use – of all Americans,” said Rosen. “The bottom line in assessing the success of the ACA is whether or not we are getting the most health from our investment of increasingly limited resources. Are we getting the most health bang for our bucks?”

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New NIH awards focus on nanopore technology for DNA sequencing

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded grants of $17 million to eight research teams, with a focus on nanopore technology aimed at more accurate and efficient DNA sequencing.

These grants are the latest awarded through the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)’s Advanced DNA Sequencing Technology program, which was launched in 2004. NHGRI is part of NIH.

“Nanopore technology shows great promise, but is still a new area of science. We have much to learn about how nanopores can work effectively as a DNA sequencing technology, which is why five of the program’s eight grants are exploring this approach,” said Jeffery A. Schloss, Ph.D., program director for NHGRI’s Advanced DNA Sequencing Technology program and director of the Division of Genome Sciences.

Nanopore-based DNA sequencing involves threading single DNA strands through tiny pores. The individual base pairs – chemical letters of DNA – are then read one at a time as they pass through the nanopore. The bases are identified by measuring the difference in their effect on current flowing through the pore. For perspective, a human hair is 100,000 nanometres in diameter; a strand of DNA is only 2 nanometres in diameter.

This technology offers many potential advantages over current sequencing methods, e.g. real-time sequencing of single DNA molecules at low cost and the ability for the same molecule to be reassessed over and over again. Current systems involve isolating DNA and chemically labelling and copying it. DNA has to be broken up, and small segments are sequenced many times. Only the first step of isolating DNA would be necessary with nanopore technology.

Innovation is crucial in these, as well as the other (non-nanopore) genome studies being funded. For example, one team eventually hopes to use light to sequence DNA on a smartphone chip for under $100.

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Robots taking over the economy: sudden rise of interacting machines trading at speeds too fast for humans

Researchers have discovered a "global ecology" of interacting machines that trade on the global markets at speeds too fast for humans, causing periodic outages. These high frequency trading algorithms could lead to increasingly large crashes, as the volume of data in the world continues to grow exponentially.

Recently, the global financial market experienced a series of computer glitches that abruptly brought operations to a halt. This was so serious that – on one day – it resulted in a third fewer shares being traded in the USA. One reason for these "flash freezes" may be the sudden emergence of mobs of ultrafast robots, which trade on the global markets and operate at speeds beyond human capability, thus overwhelming the system. The appearance of this "ultrafast machine ecology" is documented in a new study published today in Nature Scientific Reports.

The findings suggest that for time scales less than one second, the financial world makes a sudden transition into a cyber jungle inhabited by packs of aggressive trading algorithms. "These algorithms can operate so fast that humans are unable to participate in real time, and instead, an ultrafast ecology of robots rises up to take control," explains Neil Johnson, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami (UM).

"Our findings show that, in this new world of ultrafast robot algorithms, the behaviour of the market undergoes a fundamental and abrupt transition to another world where conventional market theories no longer apply," Johnson says.

Society's push for ever faster systems that outpace competitors has led to algorithms capable of operating faster than the response time for a human. For instance, the quickest a person can react to potential danger is about one second. Even a chess grandmaster takes around 650 milliseconds to realise that he is in trouble – yet microchips for trading can operate in a fraction of a millisecond (1 millisecond is 0.001 seconds).

In this study, the researchers assembled and analysed a high-throughput millisecond-resolution price stream of multiple stocks and exchanges. From January 2006, through to February 2011, they found 18,520 extreme events lasting less than 1.5 seconds, including both crashes and spikes.

The team realised that as the duration of these ultrafast extreme events fell below human response times, the number of crashes and spikes increased dramatically. They created a model to understand the behaviour and concluded that the events were the product of ultrafast computer trading and not attributable to other factors, such as regulations or mistaken trades. Johnson, who is head of the inter-disciplinary research group on complexity at UM, compares the situation to an ecological environment.

"As long as you have the normal combination of prey and predators, everything is in balance, but if you introduce predators that are too fast, they create extreme events," Johnson says. "What we see with the new ultrafast computer algorithms is predatory trading. In this case, the predator acts before the prey even knows it's there."

Johnson explains that in order to regulate these ultrafast computer algorithms, we need to understand their collective behaviour. This is a daunting task, but is made easier by the fact that the algorithms that operate below human response times are relatively simple, because simplicity allows faster processing.

"There are relatively few things that an ultrafast algorithm will do," Johnson says. "This means that they are more likely to start adopting the same behaviour, and hence form a cyber crowd or cyber mob which attacks a certain part of the market. This is what gives rise to the extreme events that we observe," he says. "Our math model is able to capture this collective behaviour by modelling how these cyber mobs behave."

In fact, Johnson believes this new understanding of cyber-mobs may have other important applications outside of finance – such as dealing with cyber-attacks and cyber-warfare.

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