John Kheir, MD, first envisioned an injectable form of oxygen eight years ago, the night one of his patients, a nine-month-old girl, died after catastrophic lung failure. Kheir, a cardiac intensive care specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, spoke last night to WBZ-TV’s Mallika Marshall, MD, about his efforts to try to buy precious time for children whose lungs stop working:
Want to know more? Read Kheir’s own words about his hopes and challenges for intravenous oxygen in a post he penned for Vector.
Good things, including therapeutics, can come in small packages—and increasingly this means nano-sized packages. For a sense of the scale of these diminutive tools, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter.
Vector’s new sister publication, Innovation Insider, looks at the promise and challenges of nanomedicine—both technical and regulatory. Read more about nanoscissors, theranostics, quantum dots and how the future is nano.
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There’s no other way to say it: sepsis is a horrible disease. It typically starts with a runaway bacterial infection in the blood, followed by a runaway immune response that severely damages the body it’s trying to save. The results: shock, multiple organ failure and—in between 210,000 and 375,000 people in the United States alone every year—death.
Part of the problem is that the methods available for treating sepsis aren’t particularly good. Antibiotics can kill the bacteria, but that still leaves bacterial debris floating in the bloodstream, fueling the already over-excited inflammatory response.
Removing the bacteria altogether—as fast as possible—would be the better solution. At least that’s what Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, thinks. His lab at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Division of Critical Care Medicine has developed a new approach that combines magnetic nanoparticles, a synthetic molecule (called bis-Zn-DPA) that binds to the bacteria, and magnetized microfluidic devices to pull bacteria from the blood quickly and efficiently. Full story »
We're at the cusp of integrating miniaturized electronics and monitoring into engineered tissues and organs.
At the start of the 2009 Star Trek reboot (this is relevant, trust me), the USS Kelvin’s captain meets the enemy on their ship to try to negotiate a cease-fire. His crew uses a kind of sensing technology to track his vital signs—like heart rate, breathing, body temperature—right up to the moment of his untimely demise.
While we’re not quite up to the technology level of the Star Trek universe, the ability to remotely sense what’s going on in tissues and organs is something of a holy grail for bioengineers. This is especially true for artificial or engineered organs: If you’d grown a new kidney for a patient needing a transplant, for example, you’d want some way to monitor it and make sure it’s working properly. It’s something that the body does naturally, but that bioengineers have struggled to replicate. Full story »
This syringe, containing particles of oxygen gas mixed with liquid, can potentially save the lives of patients unable to breathe -- like the infant Kheir was unable to save early in his career.
John Kheir, MD, is a staff physician and researcher in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Boston Children’s Hospital. As reported this week in Science Translational Medicine, he led a team that created a method for IV oxygen delivery — tiny particles filled with oxygen gas, mixed with liquid and injected directly into the blood. In an emergency, the injections could potentially buy clinicians time to start life-saving therapies. The technology was reported by The Atlantic, Popular Science, Scientific American, Technology Review and other outlets.
It was an ordinary Saturday night in the ICU at Boston Children’s, in the fall of 2006. One of my patients was a 9-month-old girl who was admitted with pneumonia, and was having trouble breathing. I had gone in to check on her just a few minutes before; although she was not feeling well, she reached out and touched my hand as I examined her. I assured her mother she was in the best possible place for her care.
Five minutes later, the code bell alarmed. Our team rushed into her room to the most horrific sight I have ever seen. Full story »
Recent research on Type 1 diabetes has begun focusing on prevention: Studies indicate that children start developing diabetes-related autoantibodies sometimes years before they develop clinical diabetes requiring insulin shots. The autoantibodies are an indicator of insulitis – a precursor condition in which the insulin-producing islets in the pancreas become inflamed and infiltrated with white blood cells.
In animal models, immune-suppressing drugs have been shown to blunt this attack by curbing the number of white blood cells circulating in the body. That reduces the need for insulin treatment – but at a high cost: Given systemically, the high doses needed to suppress the immune attack cause kidney toxicity, reduce the ability to fight infections, and decrease the body’s ability to respond to insulin.
People who have had a heart attack or have coronary artery disease often sustain damage that weakens their heart. Milder forms of heart failure can be treated with medications, but advanced heart dysfunction requires surgery or heart transplant. A team of physicians, engineers and materials scientists at Children’s Hospital Boston and MIT offers two alternative ways to strengthen weakened, scarred heart tissue — both involving nanotechnology.
One approach blends nanotechnology with tissue engineering to create a heart patch laced with gold whose cells all beat in time – as shown in the above video.
The other uses minute nanoparticles that can find their way to dying heart tissue, carrying stem cells, growth factors, drugs and other therapeutic compounds. Full story »
A patch-clamp recording captures the electrical activity of a single sperm cell.
It’s found only in the tails of sperm. It takes seven genes to build it. It gets activated as the sperm gets closer to the egg, giving it that extra whip and thrust to make it across the finish line.
David Clapham, its discoverer, named it CatSper. Blocking it could literally make sperm impotent. This could be the basis of a new contraceptive gel or a pill that could be used by men or women.
And that’s of interest to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With the world’s population projected to reach 7 billion this year, Full story »
Tal Dvir, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Robert Langer, ScD (MIT) and Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD (Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School).
As tissue engineers, we seek to develop functioning substitutes for damaged tissues and organs. Generally, this means seeding cells onto 3-dimensional porous scaffolds made of biomaterials, which provide mechanical support and instructive cues for the developing engineered tissue. Now it’s time to go to the next level, and make complex tissues that can really do things — contract, release growth factors, conduct electrical signals and more. Things our own cells and tissues do.
A review by Dvir et al: http://bit.ly/fXNatureNano-v
Engineering a functional tissue is difficult. Cells must be organized into tissues with structural and physiological features resembling actual structures in the body. The outer connective tissue that supports cells, known as the extracellular matrix, is especially interesting to us. The matrix and its components — fibers, adhesion proteins, proteoglycans and others — provide cells with a wealth of information that regulates cell growth, shape, migration and differentiation.
To mimic these physiologic features, we work at the nanoscale – creating structures at the range of 1 billionth of a meter, Full story »
When I first arrived in Chicago for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) conference in May, I couldn’t help but feel small. The buildings are taller than in Boston, but I felt especially small inside the gigantic conference center. The ceilings were far overhead, and the walk across was marathon-long. The number of attendees was over 15,000, an ocean of people. I felt further diminished by the keynote speakers, who included George Bush, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Full story »
