Tag: Andreas Menn

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Andreas Menn in Wirtschaftswoche introduces the latest medical applications of smartphones for monitoring physical functions, ranging from the heartbeats of unborn children to blood sugar, blood pressure and pulse rates of elderly people to even pacers and other implants. According to Menn, the Mobile Health sector has a 19% market growth. In the US, patients are joining movements like The Quantified Self to collect health data for research purposes (and, as an example, to determine the ideal moment for wake-up). Contact lenses measure and report blood sugar levels, while tests strips or clothes with in-built wearable electronics control breathrate, wound swelling and urine for dangerous deviations. The field is still littered with startups, but big players like Siemens, Philips, sanofi aventis and Deutsche Telekom also have stepped in already.

Joachim Müller-Jung in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports from the recent meeting of the Stem Cell Network North Rhine Westphalia. The debates focused on quality control of induced stem cells and the ability to derive motor neurons from such stem cells.

In The New York Times, Nicholas Wade reports on a recently discovered bundle of genes regulating the growth of heart muscles cells. The study published in Science will be of great interest for the development of novel therapeutics. It is known today that heart muscle cells are replaced in humans – however, the growth rate is too slow to replace the loss of many cells, e.g. in a heart attack. By modulating these genes, it might one day be possible to regenerate heart muscle in a targeted manner.

In Wired, Brandon Keim features a proposal by theoretical physicists that bacteria might transmit electromagnetic signals by using their DNA chromosomes as an antenna. The proposal is likely to trigger controversy as many biologists doubt that bacteria emit electric signals. French nobelist Luc Montagnier had already claimed in 2009 that bacteria do transmit radio signals in the 1 kHz range.

In the New Scientist, Ferris Jabr introduces a super twisty beam of laser light that is able to tell left-hand molecules from right-hand ones, with potential applications in drug development. Rowan Hooper reports on successful attempts to cure certain forms of blindness by introducing genes from algae into the eyes. The genes are encoding for channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), a photosensitive protein used by unicellular algae to orient towards light. The mice carrying a hereditary form of blindness were treated with subretinal injections of viruses carrying the algal gene and subsequently were able to use light beams for orientation in a maze. Trials in humans, the article states, might begin in two years. Finally, Andy Coghlan features findings that humans can be grouped by one of three gut ecosystems. These three “enterotypes” – dominated by three different species each – have been found all over the world and have a bias towards degradation of certain nutrients and production of certain vitamins.

And finally, for those of you who loved the Get a Mac ads by Apple (“I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”), please have a look at the ad campaign of Ion Torrent comparing its PGM sequencer to competitors such as MiSeq.

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Sebastian Matthes, Thomas Kuhn, Dieter Duerand and Susanne Kutter this week in Wirtschaftswoche introduce the winners of Innovationspreis 2011 (innovation award 2011). In the “Startup” category, the winner is Human Machine Intelligence, a Heidelberg-based IT company that developed the “Lingua” software able to understand and answer complete spoken sentences. “Big corporation” category winner is machine building company Freudenberg for its development of production processes that save 85% steel and do not produce waste. In the “medium-sized business” category, the winner is med tech firm Carl Zeiss Meditec which developed Intrabeam, a new cancer radiation therapy device that saves breast cancer patients week-long radiation therapy cycles and improves quality of life.

Also in Wirtschaftswoche, Andreas Menn features innovative printing technologies based on conductive ink and provides glimpses into the future of organic electronics for everyday products: flexible and printed electronic displays for ads and packages, loudspeakers from plastic foil, broadcasting metro tickets and pill containers that inform a cell phone software once a patient has withdrawn a pill. Among others, the article introduces German startup Printechnologics, based in Chemnitz, whose Aircode Touch technology can mark any type of paper with an invisible code that can be recognized and processed by smartphone touchscreens so that it can direct users to websites and/or authenticity certificates. Another German startup, Heliatek in Dresden, is developing printed solar cells that are to be sold by the meter in building supply stores.

Steven Salzberg in Forbes this week features a vitriolic comment of the decision of respected BioMedCentral (BMC), owned by Springer Science publishing house, to add a journal devoted to “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, or TCM,  to its portfolio of respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals. He introduces a “laughably bad study” and states, readers should bring “a high tolerance for quackery”, concluding: “BMC should be embarrassed to be publishing journals that promote anti-scientific theories and otherwise muddy the literature. By supporting these journals, they undermine the credibility of many excellent BMC journals. They should cut these journals loose.”

The Economist this week writes about “a serious gap in biologists’ understanding of the diversity of life”, featuring metagenomics research results that points to the existence of a new domain of life in the oceans, adding to the already known domains of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. Another feature deals with back-scattering interferometry (BSI) that can be applied to studying membrane proteins unmodified and in situ using a laser in a simple, low-cost way. The technology may be used to study the interference of membrane receptors with drug candidates and to understand side effects and differences in the response of patients to already marketed drugs. Already, the inventors founded a startup, Molecular Sensing, in San Francisco, Calif.

In New Scientist this week, Helen Thomson reports that a brain electronic implant in a paralyzed women successfully passed the 1,000-day milestone. Wendy Zukerman describes that a new, non-invasive test might soon be available to diagnose the nerve damage associated with diabetes to predict the amputation risk of diabetes patients, and Peter Aldhouse writes about his first encounter with robots at Complete Genomics, a California-based startup that offers large-scale, complete human genome sequencing services as an end-to-end outsourced service to companies and research institutions.