Community pharmacies should be reimbursed for their additional costs during the COVID-19 pandemic “as soon as possible”, the prime minister has told The Pharmaceutical Journal.

The General Pharmaceutical Council has said it is “double, treble, quadruple-checking” for any “flexibility” that would allow all overseas candidates to sit the March 2021 registration assessment exam in their countries of residence.

Starting COVID-19 patients on prophylactic anticoagulation within 24 hours of being admitted to hospital has been linked to a reduced risk of mortality.

The General Pharmaceutical Council has said most candidates living in countries with a two-hour or more time difference from the UK will be able to apply to sit the registration assessment at home.

Community pharmacies able to administer up to 400 COVID-19 vaccines per week can now apply to become designated vaccination sites, NHS England has said.

The UK’s first postal inhaler recycling scheme has been launched by pharmaceutical company Chiesi to support a more sustainable way of living for people with respiratory illnesses.

More than half of patients with asthma in the UK are “potentially overusing” short-acting β2-agonists, according to research.

By Ankit Mahadevia, former CEO of Spero Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC Drug development is complex. So is running a business. Sometimes, the work of doing both can make your head spin. In my

The post Boiling It Down: Conveying Complexity For Decision-makers appeared first on LifeSciVC.

By Ankit Mahadevia, chairman of Spero Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC A common theme in startup literature is that by cutting a range of unnecessary tasks, a step-change in results will follow.  I’ve found

The post Keeping It Simple: What Really Matters For Emerging Enterprises   appeared first on LifeSciVC.

An AllTrials report for the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee this week has found that 33 NHS trust sponsors and six UK universities are reporting none of their clinical trial results, while others have gone from 0% to 100% following an announcement from the Select Committee in January that universities and NHS […]

When university and hospital trusts were called to the UK parliament last year to answer questions on why they were not following the rules on reporting results, we saw how effective the questioning from politicians was. Those of you who watched the parliamentary session saw the pressure the university representatives were put under. Because the politicians asked […]

Sudan's civil war has displaced 10 million citizens. Here are profiles of two young people from the most vulnerable groups: an unaccompanied minor caring for twin brothers, a woman who was raped.

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This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Sea turtles are remarkable creatures for a number of reasons, including the way they hear underwater—not through openings in the form of ears, but by detecting vibrations directly through the skin covering their auditory system. Inspired by this ability to detect sound through skin, researchers in China have created a heart-monitoring system, which initial tests in humans suggest may be a viable for monitoring heartbeats.

A key way in which doctors monitor heart health involves “listening” to the heartbeat, either using a stethoscope or more sophisticated technology, like echocardiograms. However, these approaches require a visit to a specialist, and so researchers have been keen to develop alternative, lower cost solutions that people can use at home, which could also allow for more frequent testing and monitoring.

Junbin Zang, a lecturer at the North University of China, and his colleagues specialize in creating heart-monitoring technologies. Their interest was piqued when they learned about the inner workings of the sea turtle’s auditory system, which is able to detect low-frequency signals, especially in the 300- to 400-hertz range.

“Heart sounds are also low-frequency signals, so the low-frequency characteristics of the sea turtle’s ear have provided us with great inspiration,” explains Zang.

At a glance, it looks like turtles don’t have ears. Their auditory system instead lies under a layer of skin and fat, through which it picks up vibrations. As with humans, a small bone in the ear vibrates as sounds hit it, and as it oscillates, those pulses are converted to electrical signals that are sent to the brain for processing and interpretation.

iStock

But sea turtles have a unique, slender T-shaped conduit that encapsulates their ear bones, restricting the movement of the similarly T-shaped ear bones to only vibrate in a perpendicular manner. This design provides their auditory system with high sensitivity to vibrations.

Zang and his colleagues set out to create a heart monitoring system with similar features. They created a T-shaped heart-sound sensor that imitates the ear bones of sea turtles using a tiny MEMS cantilever beam sensor. As sound hits the sensor, the vibrations cause deformations in its beam, and the fluctuations in the voltage resistance are then translated into electrical signals.

The researchers first tested the sensor’s ability to detect sound in lab tests, and then tested the sensor’s ability to monitor heartbeats in two human volunteers in their early 20s. The results, described in a study published 1 April in IEEE Sensors Journal, show that the sensor can effectively detect the two phases of a heartbeat.

“The sensor exhibits excellent vibration characteristics,” Zang says, noting that it has a higher vibration sensitivity compared to other accelerometers on the market.

However, the sensor currently picks up a significant amount of background noise, which Zang says his team plans to address in future work. Ultimately, they are interested in integrating this novel bioinspired sensor into devices they have previously created—including portable handheld and wearable versions, and a relatively larger version for use in hospitals—for the simultaneous detection of electrocardiogram and phonocardiogram signals.

This article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “Sea Turtles Inspire Heart-Monitor Design.”

In 2010, Melanie Reid fell off a horse and was paralyzed below the shoulders.

“You think, ‘I am where I am; nothing’s going to change,’ ” she said, but many years after her accident, she participated in a medical trial of a new, noninvasive rehabilitative device that can deliver more electrical stimulation than similar devices without harming the user. For Reid, use of the device has led to small improvements in her ability to use her hands, and meaningful changes to her daily life.

“Everyone thinks with spinal injury all you want to do is be able to walk again, but if you’re a tetraplegic or quadriplegic, what matters most is working hands,” said Reid, a columnist for The Times, as part of a press briefing. “There’s no miracles in spinal injury, but tiny gains can be life-changing.”

For the study, Reid used a new noninvasive therapeutic device produced by Onward Medical. The device, ARC-EX (“EX” indicating “external”), uses electrodes placed along the spine near the site of injury—in the case of quadriplegia, the neck—to promote nerve activity and growth during physical-therapy exercises. The goal is to not only increase motor function while the device is attached and operating, but the long-term effectiveness of rehabilitation drills. A study focused on arm and hand abilities in patients with quadriplegia was published 20 May in Nature Medicine.

Researchers have been investigating electrical stimulation as a treatment for spinal cord injury for roughly 40 years, but “one of the innovations in this system is using a very high-frequency waveform,” said coauthor Chet Moritz, a neurotechnologist at the University of Washington. The ARC-EX uses a 10-kilohertz carrier frequency overlay, which researchers think may numb the skin beneath the electrode, allowing patients to tolerate five times as much amperage as from similar exploratory devices. For Reid, this manifested as a noticeable “buzz,” which felt strange, but not painful.

The study included 60 participants across 14 sites around the world. Each participant undertook two months of standard physical therapy, followed by two months of therapy combined with the ARC-EX. Although aspects of treatment such as electrode placement were fairly standardized, the current amplitude was personalized to each patient, and sometimes individual exercises, said Moritz.

The ARC-EX uses a 10-kilohertz current to provider stronger stimulation for people with spinal cord injuries.

Over 70 percent of patients showed an increase in at least one measurement of both strength and function between standard therapy and ARC-EX therapy. These changes also meant that 87 percent of study participants noted some improvement in quality of life in a followup questionnaire. No major safety concerns tied to the device or rehabilitation process were reported.

Onward will seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the device by the end of 2024, said study coauthor Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist and cofounder of Onward Medical. Onward is also working on an implantable spinal stimulator called ARC-IM; other prosthetic approaches, such as robotic exoskeletons, are being investigated elsewhere. ARC-EX was presented as a potentially important cost-accessible, noninvasive treatment option, especially in the critical window for recovery a year or so after a spinal cord injury. However, the price to insurers or patients of a commercial version is still subject to negotiation.

The World Health Organization says there are over 15 million people with spinal cord injuries. Moritz estimates that around 90 percent of patients, even many with no movement in their hands, could benefit from the new therapy.

Dimitry Sayenko, who studies spinal cord injury recovery at Houston Methodist and was not involved in the study, praised the relatively large sample size and clear concern for patient safety. But he stresses that the mechanisms underlying spinal stimulation are not well understood. “So far it’s literally plug and play,” said Sayenko. “We don’t understand what’s happening under the electrodes for sure—we can only indirectly assume or speculate.”

The new study supports the idea that noninvasive spinal cord stimulation can provide some benefit to some people but was not designed to help predict who will benefit, precisely how people will benefit, or how to optimize care. The study authors acknowledged the limited scope and need for further research, which might help turn currently “tiny gains” into what Sayenko calls “larger, more dramatic, robust effects.”

Last month when Google introduced its new AI search tool, called AI Overviews, the company seemed confident that it had tested the tool sufficiently, noting in the announcement that “people have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs.” The tool doesn’t just return links to Web pages, as in a typical Google search, but returns an answer that it has generated based on various sources, which it links to below the answer. But immediately after the launch users began posting examples of extremely wrong answers, including a pizza recipe that included glue and the interesting fact that a dog has played in the NBA.

Renée DiResta has been tracking online misinformation for many years as the technical research manager at Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

While the pizza recipe is unlikely to convince anyone to squeeze on the Elmer’s, not all of AI Overview’s extremely wrong answers are so obvious—and some have the potential to be quite harmful. Renée DiResta has been tracking online misinformation for many years as the technical research manager at Stanford’s Internet Observatory and has a new book out about the online propagandists who “turn lies into reality.” She has studied the spread of medical misinformation via social media, so IEEE Spectrum spoke to her about whether AI search is likely to bring an onslaught of erroneous medical advice to unwary users.

I know you’ve been tracking disinformation on the Web for many years. Do you expect the introduction of AI-augmented search tools like Google’s AI Overviews to make the situation worse or better?

Renée DiResta: It’s a really interesting question. There are a couple of policies that Google has had in place for a long time that appear to be in tension with what’s coming out of AI-generated search. That’s made me feel like part of this is Google trying to keep up with where the market has gone. There’s been an incredible acceleration in the release of generative AI tools, and we are seeing Big Tech incumbents trying to make sure that they stay competitive. I think that’s one of the things that’s happening here.

We have long known that hallucinations are a thing that happens with large language models. That’s not new. It’s the deployment of them in a search capacity that I think has been rushed and ill-considered because people expect search engines to give them authoritative information. That’s the expectation you have on search, whereas you might not have that expectation on social media.

There are plenty of examples of comically poor results from AI search, things like how many rocks we should eat per day [a response that was drawn for an Onion article]. But I’m wondering if we should be worried about more serious medical misinformation. I came across one blog post about Google’s AI Overviews responses about stem-cell treatments. The problem there seemed to be that the AI search tool was sourcing its answers from disreputable clinics that were offering unproven treatments. Have you seen other examples of that kind of thing?

DiResta: I have. It’s returning information synthesized from the data that it’s trained on. The problem is that it does not seem to be adhering to the same standards that have long gone into how Google thinks about returning search results for health information. So what I mean by that is Google has, for upwards of 10 years at this point, had a search policy called Your Money or Your Life. Are you familiar with that?

I don’t think so.

DiResta: Your Money or Your Life acknowledges that for queries related to finance and health, Google has a responsibility to hold search results to a very high standard of care, and it’s paramount to get the information correct. People are coming to Google with sensitive questions and they’re looking for information to make materially impactful decisions about their lives. They’re not there for entertainment when they’re asking a question about how to respond to a new cancer diagnosis, for example, or what sort of retirement plan they should be subscribing to. So you don’t want content farms and random Reddit posts and garbage to be the results that are returned. You want to have reputable search results.

That framework of Your Money or Your Life has informed Google’s work on these high-stakes topics for quite some time. And that’s why I think it’s disturbing for people to see the AI-generated search results regurgitating clearly wrong health information from low-quality sites that perhaps happened to be in the training data.

So it seems like AI overviews is not following that same policy—or that’s what it appears like from the outside?

DiResta: That’s how it appears from the outside. I don’t know how they’re thinking about it internally. But those screenshots you’re seeing—a lot of these instances are being traced back to an isolated social media post or a clinic that’s disreputable but exists—are out there on the Internet. It’s not simply making things up. But it’s also not returning what we would consider to be a high-quality result in formulating its response.

I saw that Google responded to some of the problems with a blog post saying that it is aware of these poor results and it’s trying to make improvements. And I can read you the one bullet point that addressed health. It said, “For topics like news and health, we already have strong guardrails in place. In the case of health, we launched additional triggering refinements to enhance our quality protections.” Do you know what that means?

DiResta: That blog posts is an explanation that [AI Overviews] isn’t simply hallucinating—the fact that it’s pointing to URLs is supposed to be a guardrail because that enables the user to go and follow the result to its source. This is a good thing. They should be including those sources for transparency and so that outsiders can review them. However, it is also a fair bit of onus to put on the audience, given the trust that Google has built up over time by returning high-quality results in its health information search rankings.

I know one topic that you’ve tracked over the years has been disinformation about vaccine safety. Have you seen any evidence of that kind of disinformation making its way into AI search?

DiResta: I haven’t, though I imagine outside research teams are now testing results to see what appears. Vaccines have been so much a focus of the conversation around health misinformation for quite some time, I imagine that Google has had people looking specifically at that topic in internal reviews, whereas some of these other topics might be less in the forefront of the minds of the quality teams that are tasked with checking if there are bad results being returned.

What do you think Google’s next moves should be to prevent medical misinformation in AI search?

DiResta: Google has a perfectly good policy to pursue. Your Money or Your Life is a solid ethical guideline to incorporate into this manifestation of the future of search. So it’s not that I think there’s a new and novel ethical grounding that needs to happen. I think it’s more ensuring that the ethical grounding that exists remains foundational to the new AI search tools.

Tech startups are stepping up to meet the needs of 60 million people worldwide who use opioids, representing about 1 percent of the world’s adult population. In the United States, deaths involving synthetic opioids have risen 1,040 percent from 2013 to 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic and continued prevalence of fentanyl have since worsened the toll, with an estimated 81,083 fatal overdoses in 2023 alone.

Innovations include biometric monitoring systems that help doctors determine proper medication dosages, nerve stimulators that relieve withdrawal symptoms, wearable and ingestible systems that watch for signs of an overdose, and autonomous drug delivery systems that could prevent overdose deaths.

Helping Patients Get the Dosage They Need

For decades, opioid blockers and other medications that suppress cravings have been the primary treatment tool for opioid addiction. However, despite its clinical dominance, this approach remains underutilized. In the United States, only about 22 percent of the 2.5 million adults with opioid use disorder receive medication-assisted therapy such as methadone, Suboxone, and similar drugs.

Determining patients’ ideal dosage during the early stages of treatment is crucial for keeping them in recovery programs. The shift from heroin to potent synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, has complicated this process, as the typical recommended medication doses can be too low for those with a high fentanyl tolerance.

A North Carolina-based startup is developing a predictive algorithm to help clinicians tailor these protocols and track real-time progress with biometric data. OpiAID, which is currently working with 1,000 patients across three clinical sites, recently launched a research pilot with virtual treatment provider Bicycle Health. Patients taking Suboxone will wear a Samsung Galaxy Watch6 to measure their heart rate, body movements, and skin temperature. OpiAID CEO David Reeser says clinicians can derive unique stress indications from this data, particularly during withdrawal. (He declined to share specifics on how the algorithm works.)

“Identifying stress biometrically plays a role in how resilient someone will be,” Reeser adds. “For instance, poor heart rate variability during sleep could indicate that a patient may be more susceptible that day. In the presence of measurable amounts of withdrawal, the potential for relapse on illicit medications may be more likely.”

Nerve Stimulators Provide Opioid Withdrawal Relief

While OpiAID’s software solution relies on monitoring patients, electrical nerve stimulation devices take direct action. These behind-the-ear wearables distribute electrodes at nerve endings around the ear and send electrical pulses to block pain signals and relieve withdrawal symptoms like anxiety and nausea.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared several nerve stimulator devices, such as DyAnsys’ Drug Relief, which periodically administers low-level electrical pulses to the ear’s cranial nerves. Others include Spark Biomedical’s Sparrow system and NET Recovery’s NETNeuro device.

Masimo’s behind-the-ear Bridge device costs US $595 for treatment providers.Masimo

Similarly, Masimo’s Bridge relieves withdrawal symptoms by stimulating the brain and spinal cord via electrodes. The device is intended to help patients initiating, transitioning into, or tapering off medication-assisted treatment. In a clinical trial, Bridge reduced symptom severity by 85 percent in the first hour and 97 percent by the fifth day. A Masimo spokesperson said the company’s typical customers are treatment providers and correctional facilities, though it’s also seeing interest from emergency room physicians.

Devices Monitor Blood Oxygen to Prevent Overdose Deaths

In 2023, the FDA cleared Masimo’s Opioid Halo device to monitor blood oxygen levels and alert emergency contacts if it detects opioid-induced respiratory depression, the leading cause of overdose deaths. The product includes a pulse oximeter cable and disposable sensors connected to a mobile app.

Opioid Halo utilizes Masimo’s signal extraction technology, first developed in the 1990s, which improves upon conventional oxygen monitoring techniques by filtering out artifacts caused by blood movement. Masimo employs four signal-processing engines to distinguish the true signal from noise that can lead to false alarms; for example, they distinguish between arterial blood and low-oxygen venous blood.

Masimo’s Opioid Halo system is available over-the-counter without a prescription. Masimo

Opioid Halo is available over-the-counter for US $250. A spokesperson says sales have continued to show promise as more healthcare providers recommend it to high-risk patients.

An Ingestible Sensor to Watch Over Patients

Last year, in a first-in-human clinical study, doctors used an ingestible sensor to monitor vital signs from patients’ stomachs. Researchers analyzed the breathing patterns and heart rates of 10 sleep study patients at West Virginia University. Some participants had episodes of central sleep apnea, which can be a proxy for opioid-induced respiratory depression. The capsule transmitted this data wirelessly to external equipment linked to the cloud.

Celero’s Rescue-Rx capsule would reside in a user’s stomach for one week.Benjamin Pless/Celero Systems

“To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has demonstrated the ability to accurately monitor human cardiac and respiratory signals from an ingestible device,” says Benjamin Pless, one of the study’s co-authors. “This was done using very low-power circuitry including a radio, microprocessor, and accelerometer along with software for distinguishing various physiological signals.”

Pless and colleagues from MIT and Harvard Medical School started Celero Systems to commercialize a modified version of that capsule, one that will also release an opioid antagonist after detecting respiratory depression. Pless, Celero’s CEO, says the team has successfully demonstrated the delivery of nalmefene, an opioid antagonist similar to Narcan, to rapidly reverse overdoses.

Celero’s next step is integrating the vitals-monitoring feature for human trials. The company’s final device, Rescue-Rx, is intended to stay in the stomach for one week before passing naturally. Pless says Rescue-Rx’s ingestible format will make the therapy cheaper and more accessible than wearable autoinjectors or implants.

Celero’s capsule can detect vital signs from within the stomach. www.youtube.com

Autonomous Delivery of Overdose Medication

Rescue-Rx isn’t the only autonomous drug-delivery project under development. A recent IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems paper introduced a wrist-worn near-infrared spectroscopy sensor to detect low blood oxygen levels related to an overdose.

Purdue University biomedical engineering professor Hugh Lee and graduate student Juan Mesa, who both co-authored the study, say that while additional human experiments are necessary, the findings represent a valuable tool in counteracting the epidemic. “Our wearable device consistently detected low-oxygenation events, triggered alarms, and activated the circuitry designed to release the antidote through the implantable capsule,” they wrote in an email.

Lee and Purdue colleagues founded Rescue Biomedical to commercialize the A2D2 system, which includes a wristband and an implanted naloxone capsule that releases the drug if oxygen levels drop below 90 percent. Next, the team will evaluate the closed-loop system in mice.

This story was updated on 27 August 2024 to correct the name of Masimo’s Opioid Halo device.

Neuralink’s visual prosthesis Blindsight has been designated a breakthrough device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which potentially sets the technology on a fast track to approval.

In confirming the news, an FDA spokesperson emphasized that the designation does not mean that Blindsight is yet considered safe or effective. Technologies in the program have potential to improve the current standard of care and are novel compared to what’s available on the market, but the devices still have to go through full clinical trials before seeking FDA approval.

Still, the announcement is a sign that Neuralink is moving closer to testing Blindsight in human patients. The company is recruiting people with vision loss for studies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Visual prostheses work by capturing visual information with a video camera, typically attached to glasses or a headset. Then a processor converts the data to an electrical signal that can be relayed to the nervous system. Retinal implants have been a common approach, with electrodes feeding the signal to nerves in the retina, at the back of the eye, from where it travels on to the brain. But Blindsight uses a brain implant to send the signal directly to neurons in the visual cortex.

In recent years, other companies developing artificial vision prosthetics have reached clinical research trials or beyond, only to struggle financially, leaving patients without support. Some of these technologies live on with new backing: Second Sight’s Orion cortical implant project is now in a clinical trial with Cortigent, and Pixium Vision’s Prima system is now owned by Science, with ex-Neuralink founder Max Hodak at the helm. No company has yet commercialized a visual prosthetic that uses a brain implant.

Elon Musk’s Claims About Blindsight

Very little information about Blindsight is publicly available. As of this writing, there is no official Blindsight page on the Neuralink website, and Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment. It’s also unclear how exactly Blindsight relates to a brain-computer interface that Neuralink has already implanted in two people with paralysis, who use their devices to control computer cursors.

Experts who spoke with IEEE Spectrum felt that, if judged against the strong claims made by Neuralink’s billionaire co-founder Elon Musk, Blindsight will almost certainly disappoint. However, some were still open to the possibility that Neuralink could successfully bring a device to market that can help people with vision loss, albeit with less dramatic effects on their sense of sight. While Musk’s personal fortune could help Blindsight weather difficulties that would end other projects, experts did not feel it was a guarantee of success.

After Neuralink announced on X (formerly Twitter) that Blindsight had received the breakthrough device designation, Musk wrote:

The Blindsight device from Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.

Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time.

To set expectations correctly, the vision will be at first be [sic] low resolution, like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential be [sic] better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like Geordi La Forge.

Musk included a picture of La Forge, a character from the science-fiction franchise Star Trek who wears a vision-enhancing visor.

Experts Puncture the Blindsight Hype

“[Musk] will build the best cortical implant we can build with current technology. It will not produce anything like normal vision. [Yet] it might produce vision that can transform the lives of blind people,” said Ione Fine, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Washington, who has written about the potential limitations of cortical implants, given the complexity of the human visual system. Fine previously worked for the company Second Sight.

A successful visual prosthetic might more realistically be thought of as assistive technology than a cure for blindness. “At best, we’re talking about something that’s augmentative to a cane and a guide dog; not something that replaces a cane and a guide dog,” said Philip Troyk, a biomedical engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Restoring natural vision is beyond the reach of today’s technology. But among Musks recent claims, Troyk says that a form of infrared sensing is plausible and has already been tested with one of his patients, who used it for help locating people within a room. That patient has a 400-electrode device implanted in the visual cortex as part of a collaborative research effort called the Intracortical Visual Prosthesis Project (ICVP). By comparison, Blindsight may have more than 1,000 electrodes, if it’s a similar device to Neuralink’s brain-computer interface.

Experts say they’d like more information about Neuralink’s visual prosthetic. “I’m leery about the fact that they are very superficial in their description of the devices,” said Gislin Dagnelie, a vision scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has been involved in multiple clinical trials for vision prosthetics, including a Second Sight retinal implant, and who is currently collaborating on the ICVP. “There’s no clear evaluation or pre-clinical work that has been published,” says Dagnelie. “It’s all based on: ‘Trust us, we’re Neuralink.’”

In the short term, too much hype could mislead clinical trial participants. It could also degrade interest in small but meaningful advancements in visual prosthetics. “Some of the [Neuralink] technology is exciting, and has potential,” said Troyk. “The way the messaging is being done detracts from that, potentially.”

Imagine you’re a baby cocoa plant, just unfurling your first tentative roots into the fertile, welcoming soil.

Somewhere nearby, a predator stirs. It has no ears to hear you, no eyes to see you. But it knows where you are, thanks in part to the weak electric field emitted by your roots.

It is microscopic, but it’s not alone. By the thousands, the creatures converge, slithering through the waterlogged soil, propelled by their flagella. If they reach you, they will use fungal-like hyphae to penetrate and devour you from the inside. They’re getting closer. You’re a plant. You have no legs. There’s no escape.

But just before they fall upon you, they hesitate. They seem confused. Then, en masse, they swarm off in a different direction, lured by a more attractive electric field. You are safe. And they will soon be dead.

If Eleonora Moratto and Giovanni Sena get their way, this is the future of crop pathogen control.

Many variables are involved in the global food crisis, but among the worst are the pests that devastate food crops, ruining up to 40 percent of their yield before they can be harvested. One of these—the little protist in the example above, an oomycete formally known as Phytophthora palmivora—has a US $1 billion appetite for economic staples like cocoa, palm, and rubber.

There is currently no chemical defense that can vanquish these creatures without poisoning the rest of the (often beneficial) organisms living in the soil. So Moratto, Sena, and their colleagues at Sena’s group at Imperial College London settled on a non-traditional approach: They exploited P. palmivora’s electric sense, which can be spoofed.

All plant roots that have been measured to date generate external ion flux, which translates into a very weak electric field. Decades of evidence suggests that this signal is an important target for predators’ navigation systems. However, it remains a matter of some debate how much their predators rely on plants’ electrical signatures to locate them, as opposed to chemical or mechanical information. Last year, Moratto and Sena’s group found that P. palmivora spores are attracted to the positive electrode of a cell generating current densities of 1 ampere per square meter. “The spores followed the electric field,” says Sena, suggesting that a similar mechanism helps them find natural bioelectric fields emitted by roots in the soil.

That got the researchers wondering: Might such an artificial electric field override the protists’ other sensory inputs, and scramble their compasses as they tried to use plant roots’ much weaker electrical output?

To test the idea, the researchers developed two ways to protect plant roots using a constant vertical electric field. They cultivated two common snacks for P. palmivora—a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and a legume often used as a livestock feed plant—in tubes in a hydroponic solution.

Two electric-field configurations were tested: A “global” vertical field [left] and a field generated by two small nearby electrodes. The global field proved to be slightly more effective.Eleonora Moratto

In the first assay, the researchers sandwiched the plant roots between rows of electrodes above and below, which completely engulfed them in a “global” vertical field. For the second set, the field was generated using two small electrodes a short distance away from the plant, creating current densities on the order of 10 A/m². Then they unleashed the protists.

With respect to the control group, both methods successfully diverted a significant portion of the predators away from the plant roots. They swarmed the positive electrode, where—since zoospores can’t survive for longer than about 2 to 3 hours without a host—they presumably starved to death. Or worse. Neil Gow, whose research presented some of the first evidence for zoospore electrosensing, has other theories about their fate. “Applied electrical fields generate toxic products and steep pH gradients near and around the electrodes due to the electrolysis of water,” he says. “The tropism towards the electrode might be followed by killing or immobilization due to the induced pH gradients.”

Not only did the technique prevent infestation, but some evidence indicates that it may also mitigate existing infections. The researchers published their results in August in Scientific Reports.

The global electric field was marginally more successful than the local. However, it would be harder to translate from lab conditions into a (literal) field trial in soil. The local electric field setup would be easy to replicate: “All you have to do is stick the little plug into the soil next to the crop you want to protect,” says Sena.

Moratto and Sena say this is a proof of concept that demonstrates a basis for a new, pesticide-free way to protect food crops. (Sena likens the technique to the decoys used by fighter jets to draw away incoming missiles by mimicking the signals of the original target.) They are now looking for funding to expand the project. The first step is testing the local setup in soil; the next is to test the approach on Phytophthora infestans, a meaner, scarier cousin of P. palmivora.

P. infestans attacks a more varied diet of crops—you may be familiar with its work during the Irish potato famine. The close genetic similarities imply another promising candidate for electrical pest control. This investigation, however, may require more funding. P. infestans research can be undertaken only under more stringent laboratory security protocols.

The work at Imperial ties into the broader—and somewhat charged—debate around electrostatic ecology; that is, the extent to which creatures including ticks make use of heretofore poorly understood electrical mechanisms to orient themselves and in other ways enhance their survival. “Most people still aren’t aware that naturally occurring electricity can play an ecological role,” says Sam England, a behavioral ecologist with Berlin’s Natural History Museum. “So I suspect that once these electrical phenomena become more well known and understood, they will inspire a greater number of practical applications like this one.”

CDMO Avid Bioservices is being acquired by the private equity firms GHO Capital Partners and Ampersand Capital Partners. Avid specializes in manufacturing biologic products for companies at all stages of development.

The post Private Equity Is Picking Up Biologics CDMO Avid Bioservices in $1.1B Acquisition appeared first on MedCity News.

The vast majority of older adults want to age at home. To support that goal, doctors should encourage them to consider their care options — long before they need assistance.

The post Through Early Discussions About Elder Care, Doctors Can Empower Seniors to Age in Place appeared first on MedCity News.

Whitney Haggerson — vice president of health equity and Medicaid at Providence — discussed the significance of her role, as well as how her health system is working to give all employees, regardless of title, the skills needed to help reduce health inequities.

The post Inside Providence’s Health Equity & Medicaid Strategy appeared first on MedCity News.

By adopting a contingent workforce model and investing in the right data tools to power better informed decision-making and talent strategy, healthcare organizations can begin to address staffing challenges and turn their talent goals into reality. 

The post Closing Staffing Gaps in Healthcare by Utilizing Diverse Pipelines of Contingent Talent appeared first on MedCity News.

Neurogene’s Rett syndrome gene therapy has preliminary data supporting safety and efficacy of the one-time treatment. But a late-breaking report of a serious complication in a patient who received the high dose sent shares of the biotech downward.

The post Neurogene Gene Therapy Shows Signs of Efficacy in Small Study, But an Adverse Event Spooks Investors appeared first on MedCity News.

In vitro diagnostics (IVDs) play an indispensable role in modern medicine. Health care providers routinely rely on these tests—which analyze samples such as blood or saliva—to help diagnose conditions and guide potentially life-altering treatment decisions. In 2017, for example, clinicians ordered blood tests during about 45% of emergency room visits in the United States, according to the Centers...

Hospitals across the U.S. have significantly restricted the use of pain medications containing narcotics. This shift comes amid […]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced a 2.9% cut to Medicare physician payments for […]

Social media has become a significant source of health-related content. But while it connects people to news, updates, […]

We’ve all seen Medicare Advantage (MA) plans become a significant player in the healthcare industry. Yet, with the […]

Learn how to take simple x/y coordinates, and create map polygons shaped like holiday images, that can be plotted using SAS/Graph's PROC GMAP.

This paper begins with a look at both optimization modeling and discrete-event simulation modeling, and explores how they can most effectively work together to create additional analytic value. It then considers two examples of a combined optimization and simulation approach and discusses the resulting benefits.

This paper provides an example that shows you how to use multiple RANDOM statements in PROC NLMIXED to fit nested nonlinear mixed models, and it provides details about the computation that is involved in fitting these models.

HONG KONG — China's National Health Commission (NHC) published its first set of guidelines to standardise the diagnosis and treatment of obesity, with more than half of China's adults already overweight and obese, and the rate expected to keep rising.  The guidelines, made public on October 17, come as China experiences an upward morbidity trend of its overweight and obese population. The rate of overweight or obese people could reach 65.3 per cent by 2030, the NHC said.   "Obesity has become a major public health issue in China, ranking as the sixth leading risk factor for death and disability in the country," the guidelines said. China is facing a twin challenge that feeds its weight problem: In a modernising economy underpinned by technological innovation, more jobs have become static or desk-bound, while a prolonged slowdown in growth is forcing people to adopt cheaper, unhealthy diets.

NEW YORK – Moves by major US fast-food chains to temporarily scrub fresh onions off their menus on Oct 24, after the vegetable was named as the likely source of an E. coli outbreak at McDonald’s, laid bare the recurring nightmare for restaurants: Produce is a bigger problem for restaurants to keep free of contamination than beef. Onions are likely the culprit in the McDonald’s E. coli outbreak across the Midwest and some Western states that has sickened 49 people and killed one, the US Department of Agriculture said late on Oct 23. The company pulled the Quarter Pounder off its menu at one-fifth of its 14,000 US restaurants. In past years, beef patties dominated the dockets of food-borne-illness lawyers, before US federal health regulators cracked down on beef contamination after an E. coli outbreak linked to Jack in the Box burgers hospitalised more than 170 people across states and killed four. As a result, beef-related outbreaks became much rarer, experts say.

Singapore's food culture is legendary, with staples such as chicken rice, bak chor mee, laksa, and roti prata feeding generations of locals and visitors alike. But there's one thing they all have in common — carbs! In carb-crazy Singapore, sticking to a keto diet might seem like a gone case and borderline sacrilegious, but trust me, it's doable. I've been through it, and I'm here to share my tips on how you can enjoy our local food scene while staying keto. What is keto? In case you blur about what a ketogenic (keto) diet is, it's all about cutting carbs and eating more fat. Yup, you read that right — more fat. Sounds shiok, right? The goal is to push your body into ketosis, where instead of burning carbs for energy, it burns fat. Hello, weight loss! Beyond that, keto helps you avoid those pesky post-meal sugar crashes — you know, the ones that make want to toh after a heavy meal. My keto experience I first tried keto as a teen, thinking it was just about cutting out rice, bread, and noodles. Wrong! Keto is stricter than that. To stay in ketosis, you've got to limit your carbs to just 20-50g a day.

Life can sometimes feel like a never-ending cycle of stress and decisions. That's usually my weekdays in a nutshell: chasing deadlines, making tough calls, and hopping between meetings. When your brain feels like it's on overdrive, it's time to hit pause. Engaging in some therapeutic activities can give your mind the breather it desperately needs. The good news? They don't have to be complicated or time-consuming. Here are some that can work wonders for your mental clarity and overall well-being. Step outside for a walk Walking is one of the simplest ways to clear your mind. It's amazing what a little fresh air at your nearby PCN can do. Just stepping outside and getting those legs moving can shift your perspective in a matter of minutes — and burn a few calories too! Disconnect from your phone and enjoy the sights and sounds of the great outdoors. I find that a 30-min walk and a change of environment works wonders for me, helping me rationally dissect my worries, such as my crushing feelings of inadequacy at work.

Michelle Yeoh had never heard of Wicked before she was asked to join the cast of the movie-musical. The Oscar-winning actress plays Madame Morrible in the new film version of the hit stage show, which is based around characters first seen on screen in 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. She's confessed she knew nothing about the popular musical before she was approached by director Jon M. Chu about joining the cast. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she said: "At that point, I had no clue what he was talking about because I had not seen Wicked the musical before. I knew Wizard of Oz, who doesn't, but not Wicked because I hadn't been going to the theatres and was not doing what I love which is watching musicals for quite a while, I hate to say." The new movie stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda during their time at Shiz University in the Land of Oz with Michelle's character Madame Morrible serving as the school's headmistress. Michelle went on to say: "So I read it [the script] and called Jon back and said, 'This is a musical and she sings'. And he said, 'Oh easy, you'll have fun, you're up for the challenge.'

Monday blues were non-existent at the Singapore Indoor Stadium yesterday (Nov 11) as fans of Blackpink's Lisa strolled into the venue in their Y2K-style outfits inspired by the Thai singer's Rockstar music video. Singapore was the first stop for the 27-year-old's first solo fan-meet tour and needless to say, the excitement could be felt, and heard. Once the lights turned off and Lisa appeared, the screams were deafening. The show started with a bang, fittingly with her self-titled hit song Lalisa. Usually at fan-meets of K-pop idols, the special effects are kept to a minimum unlike concerts. PHOTO: UnUsUaL Entertainment But at Lisa's, the performances were elevated with bursts of pyrotechnics and visual effects. After the first song, she sat down for a few interactive segments. During Welcome Lisa, she tried local delicacies like kaya toast and chicken rice.

The quest for realism in Thai drama The Empress of Ayodhaya went too far when a cat was reportedly drugged in a poisoning scene. In episode five of the show, the character Indravedi (Fern Nopjira Lerkkajornnamkul) suspects her drink has been drugged, so she asks nanny Thongdee (Ja Molywon Phantara) to test it out on the black feline. The cat can be seen convulsing and retching, and the camera moves to show Indravedi looking concerned, while Thongdee declares that it is dead. The scene caused public outrage with fears that the cat had actually been killed, and calls to ban the period drama were trending on X. On Nov 7, a now-deleted X account reportedly belonging to Ja posted: "The cat didn't actually die. We put it under anaesthesia, but while filming, the cat retched and seized." She and Fern initially thought the cat had actually died while filming and their faces "turned pale", she added.

Sir Elton John has overhauled his diet after suffering a health scare. The 77-year-old singer has made a concerted effort to control his blood sugar levels in recent times, after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the early 2000s and battling a "severe eye infection" earlier this year. Elton said on Ruthie's Table 4 podcast: "I can have an apple, I can eat a bit of melon. As long as you're sensible about it, it doesn't shoot your blood sugar up. But what I crave is chocolate and ice cream — I can't have any ice cream." Despite this, Elton revealed that his dream meal would still be full of sugar-filled desserts. The award-winning star — who is married to filmmaker David Furnish — said: "If I had a death row meal, it wouldn't contain anything except sweets, because I can't eat them now. So, I'd have ice cream, doughnuts, apple pie, rhubarb crumble." Elton has dealt with various health issues over the years, including having surgery for prostate cancer and battling a "severe eye infection". The singer detailed his most-recent problem in an Instagram post in September.

LONDON — Britain is to debate whether to legalise assisted dying for the terminally ill, potentially paving the way for the law to change. Below is a list of countries which allow people to choose to end their lives or are considering doing so.  Switzerland Switzerland legalised assisted dying in 1942 on the condition the motive is not selfish, making it the first country in the world to permit the practice. Doctors can prescribe drugs and administer them or had them over for self-administration. A number of Swiss organisations such as Dignitas offer their services to foreign nationals.   United States Medical aid in dying, also known as physician assisted dying is legal in 10 states: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and Washington, plus the District of Columbia. Oregon was the first state to legalise it under a law which came into effect in 1997. It allows mentally competent patients who are terminally ill and with less than six months to live to ask for life-ending medication. People from outside Oregon may travel to the state to take advantage of the law. 

BAKU — Global carbon dioxide emissions, including those from burning fossil fuels, are set to hit a record high this year, pulling the world further off course from averting more destructive climate extremes, scientists said on Wednesday (Nov 13). The Global Carbon Budget report, published during the UN's COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, said global CO2 emissions are set to total 41.6 billion metric tons in 2024, up from 40.6 billion tons last year. The bulk of these emissions are from burning coal, oil and gas. Those emissions would total 37.4 billion tons in 2024, up by 0.8 per cent in 2023, the report said. The rest are from land use, a category that includes deforestation and forest fires. The report by more than 80 institutions was led by the University of Exeter in UK. "We don't see a sign of fossil fuel emissions peaking in 2024," said lead author Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter. Without immediate and steep emissions cuts worldwide, "we will just go straight into the 1.5C target, we'll just pass it and continue," he said.

SINGAPORE – The police are investigating deepfake nude photos of Singapore Sports School (SSP) students that were created and spread by other students. In response to queries from The Straits Times, school principal Ong Kim Soon said SSP is “aware of the incident involving the creation and sharing of deepfake photos by our student-athletes”. “The school does not condone such harmful behaviour,” he said, adding that it has launched an investigation and lodged a police report. The police, in response to queries from ST, confirmed that a report was lodged and investigations are ongoing. A reader who identified himself as a parent of a victim had alerted ST in an e-mail on Nov 12 about the deepfake nude images that were being circulated. “Many parents of affected female students in Singapore Sports School are making police reports about deepfake nude photos of their daughters generated by male students from the school,” the parent said. When contacted, the parent said that female teachers were also targeted, and that the school has offered affected students counselling.

Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) reported a 42 per cent fall in its half-year profit on Wednesday (Nov 13), as the firm was hurt by the absense of S$1.2 billion it had logged through the divestiture of Telkomsel shares in its prior corresponding period. Last year, Telkomsel, the Indonesian associate of Southeast Asia's largest telecom firm, agreed to merge with its parent's IndiHome broadband arm in an effort to expand into Indonesia's fixed broadband market. SingTel's Australian unit Optus, currently embroiled in a legal battle with the country's competition watchdog, reported operating revenue of A$4.02 billion (S$3.51 billion) during the six months, in line with A$4.02 billion reported a year ago. "Optus and NCS drove the positive momentum, underscoring our focus on execution and operating rigour," the group's Chief Executive Officer Yuen Kuan Moon said. Southeast Asia's largest telecom firm said net profit for the six months ended Sept. 30 was S$1.23 billion, as compared to S$2.14 billion last year and missing a Visible Alpha estimate of S$1.37 billion.

JAKARTA — Indonesia said on Monday (Nov 11) it does not recognise China's claims over the South China Sea despite signing a joint maritime development deal with Beijing, as some analysts warned the agreement risked compromising the country's sovereign rights. Beijing has long clashed with its Southeast Asian neighbours over territory in the South China Sea, which it claims sovereignty over in almost its entirety via a "nine-dash line" on its maps that cuts into the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of several countries. Joint agreements with China in the strategic waterway have for years been sensitive, with some claimant states wary of entering into deals they fear could be interpreted as legitimising Beijing's vast claims. An arbitral tribunal in 2016 said the Chinese claim, based on its old maps, has no basis under international law, a decision China refuses to recognise. A joint statement issued at the weekend during Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto's visit to Beijing mentioned the two countries had "reached important common understanding on joint development in areas of overlapping claims".

TAIPEI — Taiwanese businessman Robert Tsao said on Nov 11 that he would sue in a Taiwan court senior Chinese officials over sanctions they had placed on him, saying he was seeking to counter China's intimidation of lawful activity. China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, said in October it would punish and sanction Tsao, the retired founder of chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp (UMC), for alleged criminal and pro-Taiwan independence activities. China's Taiwan Affairs Office said the "Black Bear Academy" that Tsao has helped fund was seeking to incite separatism that would endanger cross-strait ties. Tsao, one of Taiwan's richest men who has pledged to provide millions to two civilian defence training programmes, told a press conference that China was threatening the lawful holding of political views in Taiwan and his personal safety. The lawsuit will be lodged in a Taipei court against Song Tao, head of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, and also the office's spokesman Chen Binhua. Taiwan courts have no jurisdiction in China and senior Chinese officials do not visit the island.

Dec 5, 2023

David W. Kearn argues that deployment of nuclear weapons cannot rectify a perceived imbalance in conventional forces in the western Pacific.

May 12, 2022

Commercial international port terminals owned and operated by Chinese firms provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army during peacetime. They enable China to project power into critical regions worldwide by providing military logistics and intelligence networks.