New Bio-Ink Allows for 3D Printing of Living Tissue

A new stem cell-laden bio-ink created by scientists at the University of Bristol allows for the 3D printing of living tissue, or bioprinting. This development could lead to the printing of complex surgical bones and cartilage implants using a patient’s own stem cells in the future.

An artist’s impression of a 3D living tissue bioprinting. (Image courtesy of University of Bristol)

The bioink is composed of two different polymers: a natural extract from seaweed, and a synthetic polymer already in use in medical surgeries. The synthetic polymer converts from a liquid to a gel at exactly 37°C, while the seaweed polymer provides structural support once cell nutrients are absorbed. Amazingly, once cell nutrients are introduced, the synthetic polymer dissolves away, while the stem cells and seaweed polymer remain. The stem cells in the ink are osteoblasts (a cell that secretes the bone material) and chondrocytes (a cell that secretes the matrix of cartilage).

Dr. Adam Perriman, lead researcher from the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Bristol, stated:

Designing the new bio-ink was extremely challenging as it required a material that is printable and durable enough to maintain its shape if immersed in nutrients and does no harm to the cells. There was a lot of trial and error tests before they were able to formulate a working method.

External Link: http://www.explainingthefuture.com/bioprinting.html 

Beginnings of Bionic

I found a very interesting article in Science News, the article describes a stamp-on circuit and other new electronic devices that are designed to conform to human tissue and could keep you healthy. Michael McAlpines's circuit is dashed with gold, has a coiled antenna and is glued to a stiff rectangle, definitely not something you may want to put in your mouth. But the antenna flexes, and the rectangle is actually silk, its stiffness melting away under water. The electronic gizmo is designed to detect dangerous bacteria and send out warning signals, alerting its bearer to microbes slipping past the lips. Recently McAlpine, of Princeton University in New Jersey, and his colleagues spotted a single E. coli bacterium skittering across the surface of the gadget's sensor. The sensor also picked out ulcer causing H. pylori amid the vase molecules found in human saliva. This new device is still way to big to fit in a human mouth, "we had to use a cow tooth," McAlpine said. McAlpine and his team are planning to shrink the gadget so it can be placed on human enamel.

He is also convinced that one day, five to ten years from now, everyone will wear some sort of electronic device. McAlpine belongs to a growing pack of tech-savy scientist that are trying to merge the rigid, brittle materials of conventional electronics with the soft, curving surfaces of human tissues. This is very interesting to me, because these new little gadgets may actually let you know your getting sick before you get sick!  McAlpines "toothy circuit" is not the only bionic device mentioned in the article to read more go to the following link:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/346135/title/Beginnings_of_Bionic

Scientists Vs. Nature

 

Exam 1 blog

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/25/science/designing-life-proteins-1-computer-0.html?ref=biologyandbiochemistry

The supercomputers versus Nature. Who will win?

 

Scientists were put up to a challenge. The challenge was to try and recreate the intricate complex structures that nature does effortlessly in proteins and make their own proteins do what nature does, fold it into final form. The end result became very clear very quickly. What is it you ask? Well it was never even a contest. Nature proved its worth easily over mankind's strongest and most powerful computers that it faced.

 

Some people may wonder why even bother with nature and try to recreate our own synthetic proteins just as well as nature?

Well the answer is knowing the shape of proteins is important for designing new drugs. While scientists have learned the sequences of tens of thousands of proteins, they know the three-dimensional structures of only a small fraction of them. Going directly from the sequence to the correct geometry would amount to nothing less than a biochemical renaissance.

http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/cmbidata/proteome/pdf/0525/04.pdf

As you can see the structure of a protein is beyond complicated

and this is just one of the proteins that scientists are trying to

sythesize to create new drugs for medicine.

 

 

In recent years though mathematicians have come to believe that the general problem of predicting how any given sequence of amino acids will fold is nearly impossible, the kind of problem they call ''nondeterministic polynomial complete.'' An example is the traveling salesman problem: Given a list of cities, find the shortest path that will visit them all. The only way to solve the problem exactly is to try every single route. But as the number of cities increases, the computing time explodes out of control. Likewise, as the number of amino acids in a protein chain increases, the time needed to calculate its final configuration grows beyond hope. And for this reason scientists cannot hope to be able to be able to, at least in the near future, be able to recreate protein structures.

It was estimated that for an average sized protein made of 100 amino acids solving the folding issue would take 1027 (a billion billion billion ) years. This is why nature is winning the battle against supercomputers. Things that would take forever take nature seconds.

 

Oblivious to this argument are very long proteins, consisting of thousands of amino acids, which fold up by themselves in minutes; while shorter ones, with tens or hundreds of amino acids, fold in a second or less. The proteins have somehow found a shortcut through the maze of possibilities, and both biologists and computer scientists are dying to know what it is.



As you can see this protein, compared to the earlier one, is

much much simplier and one like this could be solved by

the scientists in the contest against nature.

 

 



Overall it became clear to all the molecular scientists in this contest. That we are so off the idea of the primary structure that we just cannot compete with it right now, however they can with the secondary structure. My opinion after reading up on this "contest" is that nature clearly has the upperhand and that the scientists should stick to what they can do right now and not go too far ahead of themselves, as it is clearly not capable of being done right now.

 

Below is a complete list of proteins that have been discovered to this date.

http://www.cellsciences.com/PDF/CytokineCenter_Complete.htm#W

Dolly, the cloned sheep

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/science/keith-campbell-cloner-of-dolly-the-sheep-dies-at-58.html?ref=biologyandbiochemistry
Keith Campbell, cell biologist, dies at the age of 58 in Derbyshire, a region of England.

Campbell was one of the most famous cell biologists because of his sheep, his cloned sheep that he created. This sheep became one of the most popular animals of all time because of the way it came to be. This idea of cloning brought upon two sides; the side for it which said this was something before deemed impossible and the scientists are overjoyed to see new work, and the other side which worried that next would be people being cloned. Campbell claimed that the greatest value of cloning lay in the potential to engineer animals to produce medications, and even transplantable organs, for use by human beings.

 

This is the picture of the famous cloned sheep, Dolly, who also normally reproduced 6 lambs. It took 277 attempts to create Dolly as the process was much moer vigorous and complex then a simple cutting as that of a plant. http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/151/cloning-dolly-the-sheep/. In this website you can find how Dolly was cloned, what happened to her throughout her life, and the reason to clone sheep and other animals.

My personal opinion on this matter is a slight mix of both views. I feel as though it can and will have its benefits in the future but the fear of being able to clone humans is a very scary thought and needs to be taken into consideration before the idea of cloning begins to run rampant.

 

 

Tireless research reveals secrets of the 'sleep hormone'

This article may be the answer for anyone out there suffering from insomnia! A team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University has made a discovery by revealing the work of melatonin, also known as the "sleep hormone." The research, which was worked on with the help of scientists in Italy, shows the role played by the melatonin receptor in the brain that promotes deep sleep. This discovery led the researchers to develop a new drug called UCM765 which will activates this receptor. The results may be the development of new and promising treatments for insomnia, which is a sleep disorder millions of people suffer from.

New compound defeats drug-resistant bacteria

After reading this article all you can do is just be amazed of the intelligence of these chemists who came up with this. According to the article a number of chemists at at Brown University synthesized this new compound that can make drug resistant bacteria susceptible again to antibiotics. As we all know all species big and small have evolved and have made adaptations over time. Bacteria like all living things have adapted as well and medication that once killed the bacteria can now sometimes prove to do nothing because of the evolution the bacteria has made to become immune to it. What these chemists have done is amazing. They have created this new compound which means that now old antibiotics that use to be unsuccessful can now once again prove to effect the bacteria once again. Thanks to these chemists at Brown university and found a way to defeat the drug-resistant bacteria we now dont have to do the more expensive option which would of been to make a new and more costly antibiotic. So our advancement in medicine continues and proves to continue to do so as our race goes on.

Nanoparticle vs. Superbug

On Monday, April 4, 2011, IBM announced information on their development of a new technology that combats and conquers drug-resistant bacteria. This drug-resistant bacteria, aka superbugs, are responsible for thousands of deaths every year. The most famous example of a superbug is MRSA. The researchers at IBM developed a new nanoparticle that essentially breaks down the cell membrane of drug-resistant bacteria, leaving the cell to biochemically degrade harmlessly inside the body. The new technology works by using "biodegradable plastic to engineer electrically charged nanoparticles that in turn attract to the bacteria’s opposite charge, in turn destroying the membrane walls hence the cell entirely." Other antibiotics work to destroy the DNA of the bacteria, which is almost always effective. Sometimes, however, not all of the bacteria is destroyed, and the remaining bacteria develops a resistance to the anitbiotics previously used, leading to a strain of superbugs. The new medicine developed by IBM destroys the bacteria's cell membrane, allowing it to degrade inside the body. Since the medicine is also composed of only organic materials, the human body can safely dispose of it, meaning that there are no side effects like most medicines can have. This new system was testing on mice infected with MRSA and proved to be very successful. IBM is in the process of setting up human trials with several pharmaceutical companies.

This article made me very happy! Hearing that someone finally had a breakthrough in developing medicine to fight drug-resistant bacteria gives me hope that breakthroughs for other diseases such as cancer or HIV/AIDS can happen as well. This discovery can lead to saving thousands and even millions of lives! Hopefully they can get the CDC to approve this new medicine rather soon so we don't have to worry about the new superbug in hospitals anymore (see "Superbug Runs Rampant").

Superbug Runs Rampant

Lately there have been stories on the news about a "superbug" that has infected many patients in hospitals across the country, even killing some of them. One news station reports on a case in Birmingham, Alabama, where 19 people were infected in 6 different hospitals; 9 of them were killed. A superbug is a type of bacteria infection that is resistant to antibiotics, the classic example being MRSA. Currently the most infected region of the country is around Los Angeles, California. In the Alabama case, health officials discovered that the outbreak was linked to a batch of IV bags produced by Meds IV in Birmingham. The IV was fed directly into the bloodstream of hospital patients, and the resulting infection was caused by serratia marcescens, "a bacteria that typically strikes patients with a compromised immune system." This is not the first time an outbreak of superbugs has occurred. Five years ago, a similar outbreak spread through hospitals in both California and New Jersey. The bacteria can be treated if caught early. This superbug is strong though, causing 60% of all infections in ICUs across the country.

I found this article not only interesting but also scary. I had never heard of the outbreak 5 years ago, so this was new to me. I had first heard the story on 6ABC news, but couldn't find their online article. It scared me because my boyfriend is currently stationed in southern California, merely 2 hours away from Los Angeles, which is said to be the most infected region. I hope they can figure out a cure to this soon.