Osteoarthritis is familiar to me. As the COVID-19 pandemic roiled across North America in 2020, my scheduled knee-replacement surgery was cancelled. After the first wave, and after being infected by the virus, it was several months before I could get to the operating room. Before surgery, I had been dealing with osteoarthritis in both knees for almost two decades. My left knee was far worse than the right. I had been receiving cortisone injections regularly to keep me ambulatory. But in July 2020 I had a prosthetic joint implanted. For years I had put off the surgery in the hope that a less in ..read more

Peter Diamandis writes in his email blast this week, “Imagine creating an embryo from a stem cell. Even further….imagine giving birth to a baby without an egg and a sperm…using an artificial womb.” This sounds like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” the English author who foretold in his novel a foreboding vision of the future. Peter goes on to describe how this seamlessly impossible capability is much closer to reality as he discusses work by two different research teams working with synthetic mouse embryos created from stem calls rather than eggs and sperm, and about keeping the embryos aliv ..read more

At North Carolina State University, researchers have developed a smart stent that has regenerative therapeutic characteristics. If you are not familiar with stents, they are small metal prostheses that are inserted into blood vessels to open them up to improve vascular blood flow. The best analogy in terms of appearance is to think of the spring contained in your ballpoint pen. Recently I had a cardiac ablation procedure that involved inserting a catheter through my femoral vein into my heart. The ablation would correct atrial fibrillation. an arrhythmia that happened after I was infected with ..read more

CRISPR, the technology first developed by Jennifer Doudna and colleagues at the University of California – Berkeley, is taking on the job of curing hereditary diseases here in the third decade of the 21st century. This is an exciting medical development that has profound implications for some of the most challenging genetic-caused conditions whether in humans or other species. CRISPR today is being tested in clinical trials to treat Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus, Glycogen Storage Disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Myotonic Dystrophy, Cystic Fibrosis, and a number of refractory cancers including ..read more

The convergence of two technologies is making it possible to free up millions of hectares of agricultural land devoted to livestock. A combination of culturing cells and 3D printing of all types of meat is likely to change land use and the diet of hundreds of millions of people around the world. It could provide reliable food sources even in the face of floods, drought and other environmental catastrophes. I’m not a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) afficionado. But imagine if KFC were to produce its chicken nuggets from stem cells and 3D-printing plants. In 2020 the news wires lit up with stories ..read more

At North Carolina State University, researchers have developed a smart stent that has regenerative therapeutic characteristics. If you are not familiar with stents, they are small metal prostheses that are inserted into blood vessels to open them up to improve vascular blood flow. The best analogy in terms of appearance is to think of the spring contained in your ballpoint pen. Recently I had a cardiac ablation procedure that involved inserting a catheter through my femoral vein into my heart. The ablation would correct atrial fibrillation. an arrhythmia that happened after I was infected with ..read more

CRISPR, the technology first developed by Jennifer Doudna and colleagues at the University of California – Berkeley, is taking on the job of curing hereditary diseases here in the third decade of the 21st century. This is an exciting medical development that has profound implications for some of the most challenging genetic-caused conditions whether in humans or other species. CRISPR today is being tested in clinical trials to treat Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus, Glycogen Storage Disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Myotonic Dystrophy, Cystic Fibrosis, and a number of refractory cancers including ..read more

The convergence of two technologies is making it possible to free up millions of hectares of agricultural land devoted to livestock. A combination of culturing cells and 3D printing of all types of meat is likely to change land use and the diet of hundreds of millions of people around the world. It could provide reliable food sources even in the face of floods, drought and other environmental catastrophes. I’m not a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) afficionado. But imagine if KFC were to produce its chicken nuggets from stem cells and 3D-printing plants. In 2020 the news wires lit up with stories ..read more

June 11, 2020 – About a week ago I received an e-mail blast from Peter Diamandis, of X-Prize fame, in which he stated that the world is facing two pandemics: the first COVID-19, the second, aging. Aging has been with us as a species from the moment humans emerged from the tree of life. Calling it a pandemic seems facile. It’s like calling erectile dysfunction a disease in men rather than a sign of aging. But nonetheless, the biopharmaceutical industry and scientific community are tackling aging as if it were a disease. In Peter’s e-mail he reviewed the technologies on the cutting edge th ..read more

September 14, 2018 – The following is the third posting to come from Jackie Roberson, a content contributor to the website Seek Visibility where she writes about technology, home life, and education. In this posting, Roberson talks about some of the biomedical breakthroughs that are occurring in 2018.  Much of Western medicine as we know it today has come from the work of dedicated biomedical engineers. Without engineering in the medical field, our healthcare professionals today would be working without the aid of imaging tools like X-rays and MRIs. Amputees would ..read more