Entrepreneurs: Medical Breakthroughs
by Miki Saxon
Cerviscope
Not all entrepreneurs start companies and develop apps, just as most world-changing breakthroughs are not software-based.
Many of the most inventive idea that will affect millions of people around the world are being done in giant corporations, academia and non-profits.
This is especially true when it comes to medical breakthroughs that are truly the stuff of humanity’s dreams.
20 years ago Dr. David Walmer went to Haiti to help paint a church. What he saw was so appalling he spent the next twenty years developing the CerviScope, an affordable tool to diagnose cervical cancer.
In the United States, cervical cancer is considered a preventable disease. “You have 10 years to detect this disease before it becomes untreatable,” Walmer says. “And it’s easy to detect. It develops on the outside of the cervix, which you can see.”
For those who watch Gray’s Anatomy this story about using modified HIV may seem a bit familiar.
There was nothing else to try. Nothing except a crazy experimental treatment never before given to a child: Blood was taken out of 6-year-old Emily’s body, passed through a machine to remove her white cells and put back in. Then scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used a modified HIV virus to genetically reprogram those white cells so that they would attack her cancer, and reinjected them. (…) [When the reaction almost killed her] Doctors gave Emily a rheumatoid arthritis drug that stopped the immune system storm–without protecting the cancer. Emily awoke on her 7th birthday and slowly recovered. A week later her bone marrow was checked. Emily’s father, an electrical lineman named Tom Whitehead, remembers getting the call from her doctor, Stephan Grupp: “It worked. She’s cancer free.”
Another approach is to tweak the body’s own immune system to stop cancer.
Researchers at the National Cancer Institute sequenced the genome of her cancer and identified cells from her immune system that attacked a specific mutation in the malignant cells. Then they grew those immune cells in the laboratory and infused billions of them back into her bloodstream.
Yet another effort uses genetically modified bacteria to target a specific protein found in most brain cancers.
The vaccine, known as ADU-623, uses a genetically modified version of the bacterium listeria monocytogenes — the bacterium that in its native form causes the listeria infection — and a specific mutated protein found only in cancer cells, said Keith Bahjat, a researcher at Providence Cancer Center in Portland. The protein used is found in more than half of brain cancers (…) The idea is to provoke an immune response to the bacterium, assuming the immune system will then also target the proteins found in the cancer cells. The goal is to wipe out the pieces of tumor that are so intertwined with brain tissue they cannot be completely removed by surgery.
Also to be noted, cancer diagnostics are going to the dogs.
Tsunami, a regal-looking dog with attentive eyes and an enthusiastic tail wag for her trainer friends. University of Pennsylvania researchers say she is more than 90 percent successful in identifying the scent of ovarian cancer in tissue samples, (…) The largest study ever done on cancer-sniffing dogs found they can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy. At least one application is in the works seeking U.S. approval of a kit using breath samples to find breast cancer.
Pretty cool, and a friend/researcher in the industry tells me that rats are used to do diagnostic testing of sickle cell anemia.
On another front, paralysis isn’t being ignored, either, leading to an amazing discovery.
But now, scientists are developing technology that can read signals directly from the brain and restore motion to a paralyzed hand — no healthy spine required.
Last, but not least, a look at how dentistry has seen the light in a way that could change a lot more than tooth replacement.
A Harvard-led team just successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. (…) The ability to naturally regrow dental tissue could transform dentistry, making it possible to regrow teeth instead of replacing them with a substitute like porcelain. But even more amazingly, once it’s better understood, this same technique could potentially be used to heal wounds and regenerate bone, skin, and muscle.
Truly amazing, life-changing innovation happening in our lifetime.
Flickr image credit: Family HM
