A consulting firm dealing with long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
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alt="http://hfdigest.com/wp-content/gallery/pics/robomed2.jpg" With lots of help from stem cells, tissue engineering and regeneration is growing up fast. Tissue-engineered skin and cartilage are already here, and starting next year replacement bladders engineered from adult stem cells will likely join them. Windpipes engineered from adult stem cells have cured lamb fetuses of windpipe defects from which they might otherwise […]
Population aging means heart disease could be a growing burden on healthcare systems the world over, but not if stem cell therapies currently in various stages of development are fully validated and become widely accessible. And the breakthroughs keep on coming. “Labs-on-a-chip” are contributing to stem cell therapy research, stable and pure nerve cells (needed […]
The launch of another well-pedigreed journal devoted to nanomedicine is not the only further evidence of nanomedicine’s arrival. The US National Cancer Institute’s bold new plan to put an end to lung cancer by 2015, and its significant new funding of nanomedical approaches to cancer research, clinches it. Signs that the nanomedical approach will pay […]
The cost of sequencing an entire human genome was US$800 million in 2003, $20 million in early 2005, $1-2 million today, and may soon reach $20,000. (In the July issue we reported that a $5,000 whole genome sequence could be possible in 2007.) However, the full benefits of sequencing an entire genome will not be […]
The prowess of Israel’s Weizmann Institute continues to amaze. It was there that researchers developed cancer-killing nanobots, and it was there that a clean, safe, and inexpensive way of producing hydrogen for fuel cells was proposed and has now been taken to the next level. A revolutionary nanomaterial has the potential to spread very quickly […]
Several variations on the Star Trek non-invasive, handheld, diagnostic “tricorder” theme have been reported in past issues (and we’ve just mentioned another, in the Devices section). Here’s another version anyone can use — doctor not needed. For the moment, however, doctors will be needed to use nanowire arrays developed at Harvard to detect a cancer […]
3-D images may show up on cell-phones before they show up on TVs. Where will the massive 3-D image files be stored? Perhaps on the 100 GB chip made possible by nanotechnology and the science of spintronics. And where will the extra power needed to display 3-D picture files, without draining your cell phone battery […]
While Japan seeks to improve its position in basic science research, India is taking advantage of the restrictions placed on the US biotechnology industry to fill the resulting vacuum in cloning and embryonic stem cell research, and it has the resources and ethics to succeed. Meanwhile, some medical device manufacturers and physicians have been taking […]
Semiconductor industry analysts see gloom in the cost of etching silicon circuits at reducing nanoscale. Yet, even absent breakthroughs in exotic forms of computing, workarounds such as the “multicore” processors introduced by Sun and AMD (and soon to be joined by Intel and IBM) will keep Moore’s Law alive in effect if not in the […]
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