1 out every 5 Americans, which is approximately 50 million people, have an allergy to at least one type of substance . Most allergies are caused by airborne allergens (pollen, dust, mold), food, insect stings, medication and even latex or other materials you touch. An allergy occurs when the immune system mistakes a harmless substance for something that is a dangerous invader. The immune system will then create antibodies so that when the body recognizes this substance again it will release a number of chemicals that will cause allergy symptoms. Symptoms vary depending on what a person is allergic to, but the most common allergy in the United States is to allergic rhinitis. This is basically just indoor/outdoor allergies which include reactions to trees, grass and weed pollen; mold spores; dust mite and cockroach allergen; and, cat, dog and rodent dander.
For people who have severe allergies, taking medication whenever their symptoms are prevalent isn’t enough so they must do allergen immunotherapy treatment. This requires the patients to have weekly injections of medication that will gradually reduce the allergic reactions over time. The pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. has developed a tablet that dissolves under the tongue that could act as a replacement for shots. Merck & Co. isn’t the only company that has been looking into tablets and droplets as a replacement for injecting the medication through a shot, a number of companies across the United States have been developing medication for a number of allergies. Most of these companies are waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to review their applications and okay the treatment. These tablets are commonly used in Europe and Asia and numerous clinical trials have been conducted that prove the tablet is safe and efficient. If the FDA approves the tablets for use in the United States it will make a positive difference for the millions of Americans who suffer from severe allergies who will no longer have to go to the doctors office every week to receive this shot and can just take this tablet.
When your exercising do you ever feel uncomfortable because your clothes cling to you from all your sweat or from the sweat stains that show through on your clothes?
Well you might not have to worry about that for much longer because a new material has been created that can suck all the sweat through and make it not stick in your clothing. At the University of California Davis Tingrui Pan, a professor of biomedical engineering, and his research team developed a new material that works just like human skin by causing sweat to form into droplets that will trickle away on their own. The material was created by using hydrophilic threads that are stitched together that will suck the droplets through the threads to the other side where they will seep out. The location of where the fluid, or sweat in this case, would flow out can be adjusted by the pattern of the threads and how they are stitched onto the material. Because the material is highly water repellent, instead of the material transporting the fluid by a capillary-like action the repellent on the surrounding material helps drive the fluid through the channels of the fabric. A very appealing characteristic of the material is that even after all of the fibers are completely saturated the fluid will still be pumped out which makes it so different from common fabrics. This is because of the pressure gradient of the droplets on the surface of the material which also allows the rest of the material to remain dry and breathable.
Athletes and clothing companies are extremely interested in this new material because of its many abilities, and especially because the team of researchers who created the material did not use a complicated micro-fabrication technique which means that it can easily be used in large scale textile production. This new material could lead to new clothing that would remain dry and comfortable throughout an entire workout even if you are sweating immense amounts.
A recent engineering advancement is the first permanently cross-linked hydrogel that has the capabilities of living tissue to heal itself when damaged. . Hydrogels are 3-D networks of cross-linked chains of superabsorbent, hydrophilic polymers that can be made up of any natural or synthetic polymer and is 99.9 % of water. This advancement is detailed in the article Hydrogel, Heal Thyself which discusses what hydrogels are and their uses. Dr. Shyni Varghese headed the project and designed this particular hydrogel used advanced simulation technology, she designed a mater made of acryloyl-6-aminocaproic acid precursors ‘decorated’ with dangling side-chain hydrocarbon molecules that create the primary structure . When the hydrogel comes in contact with a low ph solution it is able to create strong bonds instantly and act as a Velcro- type product. Dr. Varghese also realized that raising the pH levels in experimental conditions enabled her to reverse the healing process which allows her to manipulate the hydrogel; however, it does not affect the strength of the bond. This engineering advancement could mean great things for the medical field in that it could be used in the human stomach to act as an adhesive or drug for stomach ulcers and perforations because it requires such a low pH environment. Its self- healing capability is what makes hydrogels so interesting and it is thought that it could maybe be used later on in tissue engineering, stem cell research, biosensing, and large-scale protein production.
A very important application for hydrogels that has been discovered recently by the National Institute of Standards and Technology is to be used as an environment to study nanoparticle-influenced cell biology over extended periods of time. The hydrogels support and promote the growth and differentiation of cell populations which makes them an excellent environment to use for this study. Scientists want do more studies of how these interactions between the cell and the hydrogel evolve over time and of how the features of the nanoparticles may change. Hydrogels are a very promising biomaterial that will have a great impact in the future.
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The pictures above represent the evolution of the pacemaker.
Pacemaker of the future
A standard blood glucose monitor and external insulin
25.8 million children and adults in the United States have diabetes, that is 8.3% of the population. Diabetes Mellitus is a disease where the human body has high levels of glucose in the blood and is not able to produce enough insulin which causes the body to not be able to process and breakdown sugar and starches. Insulin is a hormone that causes cells to take the glucose from the blood to create energy for the body.
There are two major types of diabetes, Type 1 and Type 2; Type 1 is usually diagnosed in younger people and is caused by the body not being able to produce insulin at all. People with type 1 are typically those who require external insulin and this is usually a genetic disorder. Type 2 is commonly seen in people over the age of 40 and occurs when the body cannot produce enough insulin or the cells within the body ignore the insulin.
In my BMED 111 class last quarter we were discussing the positive feedback control system that diabetes has as well as the new technology for blood glucose monitors and insulin injections. My professor told us where the term diabetes mellitus comes from; the name has both Greek and Latin roots. Diabetes comes from a Greek word that means to siphon because one of the most common
iBGStar® blood glucose monitor
symptoms of diabetes is excessive urination and it seemed like water was being siphoned from a persons mouth out of their body. The word mellitus comes from a Latin word that means sweet like honey. In the 1600s a physician named Thomas Willis would taste his patients urine and say it was “wonderfully sweet” like honey because people with diabetes tend to have a lot of sugar in their urine.
Advancing technology for blood glucose monitors has been prevalent in recent years because of the number of people who rely on them for everyday use. One of the most interesting monitors that I have heard is the one in the picture to the left. Sanofi, a world renown pharmaceutical company, created the iBGStar® which is a blood glucose monitor that is adaptable with the Apple iPhone and Ipod touch. The monitor plugs into the iPhone or Ipod touch and will store the glucose levels and other relevant information into an application for easy accessibility. The Diabetes Manager App allows users to see trends and variations in their blood levels as well as add additional information such as their carbohydrate levels and how much they exercise. Another benefit is that the blood sample size is only 0.5μL which is on the lower spectrum of blood size samples; this is a great factor for parents buying blood glucose monitors for their children.
Diabetes is such a prominent disease that so many have been trying to find a cure, but for now all we can do is to try and decrease the effects it has on people by trying to make it easy to control their glucose levels and give them easy accessibility to insulin.
Every 10 minutes a new name is added to the national organ transplant waiting list and an average of 18 people a day die from the lack of available organs for transplant, so how do we fix this problem? We obviously can’t take organs from the living and there are only a certain number of people who actually take the path to donate their organs (because organs can’t be taken from any dead person). So we have to find an alternate route and at this point doctors are looking into stem cells to help solve this problem.
Stem cells are unspecialized cells in the human body that have the capability to renew themselves through cell division at any time and can also be used to create tissues or organs in an ideal environment. They are important in the human body because they help repair damage that has occurred in regions of the body including the stomach and bone marrow and they can also become another type of cell with a more
A study that was published in the Lancet, the world’s leading general medical journal, recently reported a case where scientists were able to take a vein from a cadaver and put it into a 10 year old girl to fix a blockage in a major blood vessel between her liver and intestines. The scientists then decellularized the vein so that all that was left was the vein extracellular matrix and then proceeded to repopulate the vein with her own stem cells from her bone marrow. They placed this vein into the girl and the doctors found that the girls blood flow rates had improved drastically.specialized function such as a red blood cell, brain cell, or muscle cell.
Scientists have been trying to fully understand how the unspecialized cells become specialized. They need to know everything about the differentiation mechanism before they are able to prepare organs that are suitable for transplant and they are not at that point yet. The idea is to be able to grow organs with the use of stem cells so that transplants are not dependent on donations. At this point purely stem cell created transplants are not being used on every day patients and are typically put into far off cancer patients who are willing to take the risk because the chance of the transplant being rejected by the patients body is so high. Some believe that in the near future, say 20 years, stem cell transplants are going to be very common surgeries.
When people think of prosthetic’s they typically think of artificial limbs such as arms and legs; however, a great portion of prosthetic work is done for parts inside the body such as hearts and even eyes.
People all around the world have ocular diseases that cause the retina to degrade and can cause blindness as time goes on. Age related 
macular degeneration (AMD) and retina pigmentosa (RP) are two common ocular diseases that cause damage to the retina and is common in elderly people. There aren’t any cures for these diseases so many companies have begun to look into prosthesis that could help restore sight to those who are blind. Lawrence Livermore National Labratory and Second Sight Medical Products have developed a long term retinal prosthesis, Argus II, that can function inside of the eye. Argus II was just approved by the FDA and is now the first bionic eye prosthesis that has been approved. How the prosthesis works is that an array (the square object in the photo) is placed into the eye behind the retina. An external video camera will be mounted on the patients glasses which will then send electrical impulses into the array which will cause the brain to see light patterns. People who had these implants placed into
their eyes were able to detect objects and movement, and a quarter of them were even able to read characters the size of font for headlines. This has encouraged the engineers to improve it even more so that people will be able to distinguish between people’s faces. Even though this technology does not work for all kinds of blindness, it is going to be expanded into developing devices to help those with spinal cord injuries or even those who are deaf.
New FDA Approved Device Restores Sight for Blind (ktla.com)Related articles
Prosthetic’s are merely a body part extension that just replaces a missing limb. But the real future of prosthetic’s in biomedical engineering is in bionics. The difference between prosthetic’s and bionics is that bionics actually mimic the function of the lost body part or even goes on to improve the function of that limb.
However, with the incredible technology that arises with bionics there are great ethical concerns. TED Conversations poses this question: if you had the choice to enhance yourself, would you? Would you replace perfectly good legs with artificial ones if they made you faster and stronger? How far would you go?
With all the upcoming technology I think this is an inevitable question that people might need to start asking themselves, certainly not yet but industry is beginning to switch their
focus from just helping those who are handicapped or disabled to trying to improve brain function or how fast we can move.
Lockheed Martin, an advanced technology company, has designed the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) which is a strap on exoskeleton designed to give soldiers an edge. It allows soldiers to carry extremely heavy loads or move at a very fast pace. It allows soldiers to carry up to 200 lbs for 12.4 miles and run anywhere form 7-10 miles per hour on one charge. The downfall to the exoskeleton is that it is not self sufficient and has to be charged every so often for it to work at its maximum capacity. However, even when the power runs out the exoskeleton is self supporting and does not cause the operator any extra weight. In time they hope that this suit could be used for many other uses such as for loading cargo, SWAT team use, and even to help the paralyzed walk again.
Bionics are truly the future of technology, that incorporates so many different branches of engineering including electrical, mechanical, software, computer and biomedical engineering to create this implant that will help millions of people in the future. Whether its for those who are handicapped or if its further improving the human life.
During my first couple of weeks at Cal Poly I met a handful of people who allowed me the privilege of having the same generic conversation numerous times. It typically started with the same three questions: what’s your name, where are you from and what is your major; however, I personally just loved getting to the last question because of the original responses I would get from people:
- From first year non-engineers it was typically an “oh you’re an engineer…wow biomedical…good for you…I don’t know what that means…”
- From first year engineers it was usually an “oh you’re BMED, so you must take a lot of biology classes?”
- From older students engineer/non-engineer it was normally an “oh so you want to go into prosthetic’s huh?”
Prosthetic’s are such a big part of Biomedical Engineering that most of the people tend to think its the only thing biomedical engineers do even though there is such a vast number of other specialties including tissue and genetic engineering. Biomedical Engineering is defined as the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology, which makes it one of the most specific engineering disciplines. Because prosthetic’s are what biomedical engineers are known for, it only seems fit to start off this blog with discussing the importance of prosthetic’s and how they impact people’s lives. A prosthetic is an artificial device that replaces a missing body part so that it’s almost as if the body part is there.
I am a member of Cal Poly’s event management committee that helps coordinate the Wildflower Triathlon which takes place the first weekend of May. At our meeting this last monday we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker who is a volunteer/triathlete from The Challenged Athletes Foundation. The Challenged Athletes Foundation provides opportunities and support to people with physical disabilities so they can pursue active lifestyles through physical fitness and competitive athletics. They carry out their mission by helping athletes by providing funding grants for equipment such as sports wheelchairs,
handcycles, mono skis and sports prosthetics, and resources for training and competition expenses directly to physically challenged individuals. The guest speaker had such an inspiring story; she was such a great athlete who frequently did the Ironman (which is a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride and 26.2 mile run) but is now a paraplegic who was hit by a car a few years back which caused her to lose her leg from the knee down. The foundation helped her get an athletic prosthetic and helped her mentally through the process of learning how to exercise with a prosthetic limb. She is now able to participate in the Ironman race again and is participating in the Wildflower Triathlon this year. Her journey shows how much a prosthetic can truly do for a person by allowing her to participate in the sport she loves.
Technology for the body 