Category Health/Medical

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin may have discovered a way to switch off inflammation(Credit: Ugreen/Depositphotos)

Scientists have discovered a new metabolic process in the body that can switch off inflammation. They have discovered that ‘itaconate’ – a molecule derived from glucose – acts as a powerful off-switch for macrophages, which are the cells in the immune system that lie at the heart of many inflammatory diseases including arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and heart disease...

Healthy cells (left image) display four centrioles, a normal number (in yellow). On the contrary, breast cancer cells (triple negative) have extra centrioles (here 16, right image). Credit: Gaëlle Marteil, IGC.

A research team led by Monica Bettencourt Dias, from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC, Portugal), discovered important features of cancer cells that may help clinicians fighting cancer. The researchers observed that the number and size of tiny structures that exist inside cells, called centrioles, are increased in the most aggressive sub-types of cancer. This study will be published in Nature Communications* on the 28th of March.

Cancer is a very diverse disease with some tumours being more aggressive and more resistant to chemotherapy than others...

PrintrBot Simple Metal modified with the LVE for FRESH printing. Credit: Adam Feinberg/HardwareX

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a low-cost 3D bioprinter by modifying a standard desktop 3D printer, and they have released the breakthrough designs as open source so that anyone can build their own system. The researchers – Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Biomedical Engineering (BME) Associate Professor Adam Feinberg, BME postdoctoral fellow TJ Hinton, and Kira Pusch, a recent graduate of the MSE undergraduate program – recently published a paper in the journal HardwareX that contains complete instructions for printing and installing the syringe-based, large volume extruder (LVE) to modify any typical, commercial plastic printer.

“What we’ve created,” says ...

This is Francesco Greco, researcher at TU Graz in Austria, with a temporary tattoo electrode. Credit: Lunghammer – TU Graz

Electrodes for longterm monitoring of electrical impulses of heart or muscles in the form of temporary tattoos produced using an ink-jet printer. In the case of diagnostic methods such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and electromyography (EMG), gel electrodes are the preferred method of transmitting electric impulses from the heart or muscle. In clinical practice the frequently stiff and cumbersome electrodes noticeably restrict the mobility of patients and are not very comfortable. Because the gel on the electrodes dries out after a short time, the possibilities of taking measurements over a longer period using this kind of electrode are limited.

In the presented method, c...