The FDA’s recent approval of the Abiomed artificial heart implant will benefit only a few dozen patients annually. The next-generation model, which could be on the market in 2008, would fit more (smaller) people, but not enough to make it a blockbuster. The company is hedging its bets on assistive devices that enable ailing hearts […]

Good news for medical devicemakers: “Baby boomers are descending upon the health care infrastructure of the United States like locusts upon a cornfield,” hungry for medical devices. But with regenerative and pharmacogenomic medicine making headway fast (as other sections of this issue show), we think the boom in devices might turn out to be a […]

Stents that open clogged arteries are amazing technology and have doubtless saved many lives, not to mention brought vascular surgeons, cardiac surgeons, and interventional cardiologists almost to fisticuffs. But today’s stents are not perfect, and there is much effort under way to improve them . . . and even to replace them with tissue-engineered vascular […]

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 […]

Last time we reported on 3-D printers, the price was US$30K and up. Now it’s down to a little over $20K. Give it another 2-3 years, and “early-adopter” consumers will have one at home. Perhaps they’ll also have one of the mass-produced, low-cost, disposable “gene chips” or DNA micro-arrays of unprecedented power and sensitivity that […]

Molecular Scales; Cell Watchers; Cell Phone Fuel Cell; Molecular Scales www.physorg.com/news3533.html Kilo and mega are history. We’re almost out of gigas, and bracing for a reign of tera. But the tera will not last — supercomputing dudes are already shifting allegiance to peta, and where they go, we follow. On the other side of the […]

Sensors are well on their way to becoming as small, and ubiquitous, as dust. They are already taking jobs away from engineers at Intel. A new technique takes surround sound to a new level of realism. The problem will be in getting film makers and theatres to buy it. Surgery to fix a malfunctioning pacemaker […]

Two recent deals point to the heady growth of the medtech business, and its convergence with the biotech business. Medtech devices don’t have to have new functionality to be revolutionary. Just shrinking them can have the same effect. Interior rooms in hospitals could be given virtual windows offering 3-D views of the grounds, if claims […]

We argued in an article for H&HN (Hospitals & Health Networks) that payers and policymakers ought to consider embracing medical technologies rather than fighting them all the time. A new long-life power source for implants illustrates the potential financial benefit, as does continual glucose monitoring in diabetics, provided the manufacturers of continual monitoring devices do […]