Showing posts with label HIV. Show all posts

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Cancer Biossenser Development



This is a pleasant surprise that leaps us forward to the day when cancer is cured. It is well known that early detection allows us to aggressively eliminate the disease while it is still easy to treat.


I recall that in the first applications of the AIDS cocktail that the dosages were aggressive and caused severe side effects. Today the process is almost gentle and victims are living out their lives in very good order.


We have the ability to do this with the early onset stages of almost all cancers, yet the care is dominated by late cancers and desperate interventions. So a device able to screen immediately for the presence of offending cell forms will swiftly change all that.


And intervention is likely to be a cocktail of specific drugs able to suppress the problem, or location and removal if warranted.


It also sounds like it will be available rather quickly and can become as ubiquous as a stethoscope.


This also technology that will see steady upgrading similar to what we have experienced with cell phones.


September 28, 2009


U of T researchers create microchip that can detect type and severity of cancer


http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/u-of-t-researchers-create-microchip.html


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University of Toronto researchers, Shana Kelley and Ted Sargent, have made a cancer diagnostic breakthrough. Kelley said a five-year time frame would be a "conservative estimate" to get the device on the market.


U of T researchers have used nanomaterials to develop an inexpensive microchip sensitive enough to quickly determine the type and severity of a patient's cancer so that the disease can be detected earlier for more effective treatment.



The researchers' new device can easily sense the signature biomarkers that indicate the presence of cancer at the cellular level, even though these biomolecules - genes that indicate aggressive or benign forms of the disease and differentiate subtypes of the cancer - are generally present only at low levels in biological samples. Analysis can be completed in 30 minutes, a vast improvement over the existing diagnostic procedures that generally take days.



"Today, it takes a room filled with computers to evaluate a clinically relevant sample of cancer biomarkers and the results aren't quickly available," said Shana Kelley, a professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Medicine, who was a lead investigator on the project and a co-author on the publication.



"Our team was able to measure biomolecules on an electronic chip the size of your fingertip and analyse the sample within half an hour. The instrumentation required for this analysis can be contained within a unit the size of a BlackBerry."

Kelley, along with engineering professor Ted Sargent - a fellow lead investigator and U of T's Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology - and an interdisciplinary team from Princess Margaret Hospital and Queen's University, found that conventional, flat metal electrical sensors were inadequate to sense cancer’s particular biomarkers. Instead, they designed and fabricated a chip and decorated it with nanometre-sized wires and molecular "bait."




Abstract Nature Nanotechnology: Programming the detection limits of biosensors through controlled nanostructuring


Advances in materials chemistry offer a range of nanostructured shapes and textures for building new biosensors. Previous reports have implied that controlling the properties of sensor substrates can improve detection sensitivities, but the evidence remains indirect. Here we show that by nanostructuring the sensing electrodes, it is possible to create nucleic acid sensors that have a broad range of sensitivities and that are capable of rapid analysis. Only highly branched electrodes with fine structuring attained attomolar sensitivity. Nucleic acid probes immobilized on finely nanostructured electrodes appear more accessible and therefore complex more rapidly with target molecules in solution. By forming arrays of microelectrodes with different degrees of nanostructuring, we expanded the dynamic range of a sensor system from two to six orders of magnitude. The demonstration of an intimate link between nanoscale sensor structure and biodetection sensitivity will aid the development of high performance diagnostic tools for biology and medicine.




2 page pdf with supplemental information



Shana Kelly Lab webpage at the University of Toronto


"Uniting DNA - the molecule of life - with speedy, miniaturized electronic chips is an example of cross-disciplinary convergence," said Sargent. "By working with outstanding researchers in nanomaterials, pharmaceutical sciences, and electrical engineering, we were able to demonstrate that controlled integration of nanomaterials provides a major advantage in disease detection and analysis."




The speed and accuracy provided by their device is welcome news to cancer researchers.




The team's microchip platform has been tested on prostate cancer, as described in a paper published in ACS Nano, and head and neck cancer models. It could potentially be used to diagnose and assess other cancers, as well as infectious diseases such as HIV, MRSA and H1N1 flu.




"The system developed by the Kelley/Sargent team is a revolutionary technology that could allow us to track biomarkers that might have significant relevance to cancer, with a combination of speed, sensitivity, and accuracy not available with any current technology," said Dr. Fei-Fei Liu, a radiation oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital and Head of Applied Molecular Oncology Division, Ontario Cancer Institute. "This type of approach could have a profound impact on the future management for our cancer patients."

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Changing Life Spans


This story has been brewing for a while. It is that death rates have fallen ahead of expectations. This also shows that expectations are rising. Whether the recent pronounced fall is simply a statistical anomaly or caused by a specific change is not clearly determined as yet.

I can make a conjecture or two. During the early eighties, for reasons not terribly obvious at the time, the boomer generation not only began dumping the smoking habit, but also decided to closely manage their drinking.
It was no longer cool to become drunk out of ones mind. Those are two changes that were a clear break with the previous generational practice, or at least appeared to be.

The decline of smoking was remarked and visible, while the tighter management of alcohol was largely invisible. It was remarked more by hosts having to take back half the liquor brought in for a party.

Both changes promote better health outcomes. We forget that chronic low level drinking that occurs everyday, does damage to the liver and also promotes diabetes.

These changes have been in place for a good twenty years and that suggests that the effects on life span should now begin showing up as the boomer generation moves into their final decades.

To put this into proper perspective, if we had a serious shift in behavior in only twenty percent of the population and I believe that that is conservative, and that proportion added a reasonable ten years to their respective life spans, then that accounts for a shift in the statistics of about two years, and as noted, its appearance is simply timely.

As noted quitting smoking consistently adds a solid decade to an individual life span and management of drinking postpones the advent of diabetes by a decade also. Unfortunately, they are not additive. Most likely individuals did both and strongly reinforced their gains. Thus, in retrospect the present sudden jump in apparent life spans is consistent with past behavior that was partly unremarked upon.

All this means that boomer life spans will average in at eighty plus.



August 19, 2009

Life Expectency in the USA has increased and total deaths have fallen

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/life-expectency-in-usa-has-increased.html

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The preliminary number of deaths in the United States for 2007 was 2,423,995, representing a decrease of 2,269 from the 2006 total. The crude death rate of 803.7 per 100,000 population was 0.83 percent less than the rate of 810.4 per 100,000 in 2006. The estimated age-adjusted death rate, which accounts for changes in the age distribution of the population, reached a record low of 760.3 per 100,000 U.S. standard population, 2.1 percent lower than the 2006 rate of 776.5. illustrates the pattern of decline in both crude and age-adjusted death rates from 1980 through 2007. In 2007, age-adjusted death rates decreased from 2006 by 2.1 percent for males and by 2.2 percent for females. All of the sex, race, and Hispanic origin groups described in this report showed significant decreases in the age-adjusted death rate in 2007 from 2006, with the exception of ASIAN males, who experienced a decrease that was not statistically significant. The relative magnitudes of these decreases in age-adjusted death rates by sex, race, and Hispanic origin are:


* White males (1.7 percent)
* White females (1.8 percent)
* Non-Hispanic white males (1.4 percent)
* Non-Hispanic white females (1.4 percent)
* Black males (4.1 percent)
* Black females (4.0 percent)
* Non-Hispanic black males (4.1 percent)
* Non-Hispanic black females (3.9 percent)
* ASIAN males (0.4 percent, not significant)
* ASIAN females (4.7 percent)
* API males (4.2 percent) [Asia Pacific Islander - API)
* API females (4.8 percent)
* Hispanic males (5.5 percent)
* Hispanic females (6.6 percent)


Diseases of heart, decreased by 4.7 percent. The age-adjusted death rate for Malignant neoplasms decreased by 1.8 percent

The HIV death rate dropped 10 percent, the biggest one-year decline in 10 years

.
Michael Darling at the Speculist rightly points out that these statistics are really for the actual life expectency of people born around 1929 who ended up in America at the time of their death. Average age of death of those who died in 2007. Back in 1929 the estimate of life expectancy was 58, which was the actual of amount of life expectancy for people born in 1871. So people born in 1929 did 21 years better than those born in 1871. How will those born in 2009 actually do in terms of average lifespan ? Probably a lot better than 78 years. How about the average of the likely number of years of life left for people who are now 40 ? It is a lot more than 38 years because those alive now at 40 have made it past all infant and childhood and early adult risks. If you do a few things right (don't smoke, drink only in moderation, exercise, get checkups and know your family medical history and actively work to prevent or detect your personal risks) then you have a very good chance of making to 90+ years of age even without breakthroughs. Supporting Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) projects, like the recent successful fundraising for laser ablation of libofuscin, will help accelerate the life extension breakthroughs


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