http://nanosapiens.net/2012/01/hi-tech/gadgets/skylight-adapter-connects-microscopes-to-smartphones/ http://nanosapiens.net/2012/01/hi-tech/gadgets/skylight-adapter-connects-microscopes-to-smartphones/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:01:45 +0000 Peter Murray http://singularityhub.com/?p=44023

SkyLight co-founders Andy Miller and Tess Bakke.

The SkyLight is really a simple device derived to solve a simple problem: how to keep your smartphone still enough to take high quality photos through a microscope. Watching other people holding their cell phones up to their microscopes, SkyLight co-founder, Andy Miller, realized that he wasn’t the only one in search of a low cost and easy way to take pictures of microscope images. I recently had the joy of chatting with Miller and fellow co-founder Tess Bakke about how the SkyLight came to be, and how they think it will impact research, medicine and education.

The SkyLight is essentially an adapter that fixes a smartphone to a microscope. Using the phone’s camera to peer through the eyepiece and snap photos, you get images that are practically indistinguishable from images taken with professional microscopy cameras. The big difference is that conventional microscope cameras can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, while the SkyLight is just $60. Of course, you’ll need a smartphone too, but you probably already have one in your pocket.

The SkyLight adapter consists of a movable platform that the smartphone fits into, and a base that locks onto just about any microscope eyepiece. After connecting the smartphone to the eyepiece, you adjust the platform position to align the camera correctly, and adjust it up and down for focus. Lock it up, and you’re ready to take pictures.

“I was building a microscope in college,” Miller tells me casually, as if microscope-building was as normal as joining the chess club, “and I was trying to attach a telephone to that microscope and I realized, well, it’s fine if I can attach one cell phone to one microscope but it would be pretty feasible to have a universal adapter that would allow me to attach any phone to any microscope.”

Miller likes to build microscopes, but there’s a purpose behind his geeky pursuit. While studying bioengineering and global health at Rice University, he designed and built the Global Focus microscope – a simple, affordable microscope that can be built for areas of the world with limited resources. With off-the-shelf lenses and mirrors, an LED flashlight for a light source, and running off batteries, the microscope could take bright field and fluorescent images and cost only $240 to make. Right now there are 20 prototypes being tested in the US, Central America, and Africa.

Not too shabby: a 10X image of esophageal cells taken by an iPhone 4S.

As the Kickstarter page confesses, “Now he’s bent on making meaningful change through design.” The SkyLight is a simple idea that could have profound results. Connecting a cell phone to a microscope not only saves money, but in a developing country, it makes the difference between quality care or not. Don’t have a pathologist in your rural Kenyan village? No problem. Just send the images to the hospitals in Nairobi. SkyLight can literally bring together innovative solutions such as the Global Focus microscope and the $80 IDEOS Android smartphone, which 350,000 Kenyans had scooped up as of this past summer, to extend the reach of much needed quality healthcare.

The idea for the SkyLight came to Miller while building the cheap microscopes in Africa. The lack of resources available there forced him to create a general design. “How do you make it work with anything you might have?” He made a product that would work with any cell phone. Had he been in the US and had all the resources he needed, Miller expects the adapter he’d have come up with would have been specifically built for an iPhone and only an iPhone, or a specific microscope together with a specific phone. The tightened constraints in Africa forced Miller to make a more general use device, and it’s all the better for it. The SkyLight can work for different phones and different microscope with different kinds of eyepieces. And even though they’re focusing on microscopes at the moment, the team expects that SkyLight will eventually be used to mate smartphones with other types of cameras such as spotting scopes, the telephoto cameras used by birders. Check out their gallery of images here.

Think you could tell the difference between images taken with a phone and conventional camera? While they haven’t rigorously compared the images taken by their smartphone with images taken by conventional microscopy cameras, they’ve already passed the eyeball test. As Miller tells me, the Kickstarter page “received the most attention from…doctors, pathologists who want to do doctor-to-doctor consult.” Some physicians actually contacted the group and asked that they take pictures of samples. They took the pictures with an iPhone 4S with a resolution of 8-megapixels. After posting the pictures on their website they were contacted by multiple pathologists who told them that it’s good enough for them to make diagnoses.

The SkyLight won the Proto Labs Cool Idea! Award in the program’s inaugural year. According to their website, Proto Labs is the “world’s fastest” maker of CNC machined and injection molded parts. Their Cool Idea! Award is aimed at producing high quality prototypes for startup businesses that might not have the resources to follow through on a good idea. In a press release about the award, Proto Labs cited how SkyLight enables researchers, clinicians and educators to communicate in new ways by combining tools already available to them. Winning the award was a key achievement for SkyLight’s mission to make the adapter available to those who need it. The mold that Proto Lab has created lowers production cost and makes it more affordable. The SkyLight was listed on Kickstarter for $60, but Miller and Bakke hope to work with an NGO in the future and offer the adapter for even less.

Bakke emphasized SkyLight’s social enterprise aspect, mentioning their 5 to 1 promise: for every five SkyLights they sell they’re going to donate one to schools or other places like a local health program that could use them.

We shouldn’t forget that the camera in use is still a phone. Miller and Bakke point out that SkyLight could be used live; that is, you could connect a collaborator with a live view through your microscope all the while having a conversation.

“Can you move it a little to the left…great, now zoom in.”

As an easy and inexpensive way to generate and share images, SkyLight is an ideal telemedicine tool. Wanting to explore SkyLight’s potential, the company has sending their prototype to telemedicine researchers to tap their imaginations. At the same time they’re encouraging apps developers to come up with apps to improve image-based smartphone telemedicine and telediagnosis capabilities. Miller mentioned one app that would be universally useful would be an app that pushes images directly to a server, and labels and organizes them. That way people wouldn’t have to email or text themselves every image they want to keep.

Right now the adapter is still in its testing and production phase, but they expect SkyLight to be ready around the first of March. When that happens there will be no shortage of takers. Their first production run will be aimed at filling Kickstarter orders and getting feedback for improvement.

Kickstarter is great for turning great ideas into real tools. SkyLight’s goal was to raise $15,000. They ended up with over $22,000. I have no doubt that these two, enthusiastic young people and the SkyLight will get a lot of attention in the coming months. All they did was find a way to combine technologies that already existed, showing us once again you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create something useful.

[image credits: SkyLight]
images: SkyLight

• Hitachi’s Desktop Electron Microscope – Soon Cheap Enough for Home Use?
• $10 Cellphone Microscope Wins 3 Awards, Heading To Africa for Tests
• UCLA Team Creates New Kind of Mobile Phone Microscope

Original post source

]]> http://nanosapiens.net/2012/01/hi-tech/gadgets/skylight-adapter-connects-microscopes-to-smartphones/feed/ 0

The man of the hour. UCLA's Steven Schwartz and his team partially restored vision to two patients by injecting stem cells into their retinas.

Macular degeneration had left Sue Freeman, 78, legally blind. She couldn’t go for a walk by herself, she couldn’t go shopping or even cook by herself. Another woman, age 51, was suffering from Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, which causes the loss of cells located in the pigmented layer of the retina called the retinal pigment epithelium. Also legally blind, she was unable read the large letters on an eye chart used to test people with compromised vision.

In July of 2010 doctors injected retinal cells derived from human embryonic stem cells into one eye of each woman in the hopes that they would regrow the cells needed to see. A couple weeks after surgery Freeman improved her visual acuity score from correctly identifying 21 letters (20/500 vision) to 28 letters (20/320). She could once again pour a glass of water without spilling it, read her own handwriting, and – to the chagrin of her husband – take notice of all the improvements that needed to be done on rental properties that they own.

The other patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, could only detect hand motions prior to surgery. Two weeks following surgery she began counting fingers. She also improved from identifying zero letters on the acuity chart to correctly recognizing five. She woke up one morning and looked at the armoire in her bedroom. “It has a lot of detailed carvings and I thought wow, I was missing those before,” she told CNN.

Both patients continued to show improvement in the treated eye four months after surgery and did not show any adverse side effects. Importantly, the eyes that did not receive stem cells did not show improvement. The patients were also given immunosuppressants to prevent their bodies from rejecting the foreign tissue.

The trial was led by Steven Schwartz, an opthalmologist and chief of the retina division at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, and the results were published in The Lancet. Although the results are extremely promising, Dr. Schwartz is quick to temper enthusiasm over the trial. Only two patients were treated, after all. Many more will need to be successfully treated before the procedure can be accepted as a robust option. He justified publishing the study after only two patients given the amount of interest in the field. Qualifying the study further, Dr. Schwartz cautioned that the improvement in eyesight for one of the women could be a placebo effect.

Pigmented epithelial cells were grown from embryonic stem cells prior to injection.

The stem cells were treated before being injected into the patients’ eyes. Researchers at the company that had provided the stem cells, Advanced Cell Technology, had induced the cells to become retinal pigment epithelial cells. The procedure, which included the injection of about 50,000 cells, took half an hour. The team received stem cells from Advanced Cell Technology, which had gotten them from an embryo stored at a fertility clinic. The couple who’d produced the embryo decided not to use it and then donated it to the company. After stem cells were derived from the embryo it was destroyed. The hope is that in the future stem cells will be taken from embryos without the need to destroy them.

The stem cell treatment gives new hope to the blind. Macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss among the elderly. When the light-sensitive photoreceptors of the macula degenerate people can no longer bring objects into focus. Stargart’s muscular dystrophy, or Stargart’s disease, is a common cause of vision loss among children and young people. Right now there is no treatment for Stargart’s disease, and while drug injections, laser treatment and diet alteration can slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration, it is also considered incurable.

Others are working towards a stem cell cure for macular degeneration. In 2010 researchers successfully grew a retina in the lab from human embryonic stem cells. It was the first time a 3D tissue was produced from stem cells. Curing macular degeneration is an ideal target for stem cell treatments. The number of cells needed is low compared to, say, regrowing the neurons of a damaged spinal cord. Unlike other cells in the retina, cells of the retinal pigment epithelium don’t need to form synapses to work. Lastly, the retina’s immune environment is more tolerant, thus decreasing the need for immunosuppressants.

Pharmaceutical giant Geron Corporation used to represent one of the best chances for making stem cell treatments a reality. But recently after the company had begun human trials on their promising cell line that allowed paralyzed mice to walk again, they dropped out of the stem cell game altogether. If the UCLA trial results hold, it could entice more companies like Advanced Cell Technology to invest in stem cell research. According to a commentary on the trial, when Geron ended their trial it left ACT and Dr. Schwartz and his colleagues as the sole group treating patients with embryo-derived stem cells. That’s not good enough. Let’s hope the trial not only brings the world into focus for its patients, but also brings the potential of embryo-derived stem cells back into the focus of medicine.

[image credits: UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute, CNN and The Lancet]
image 1: Schwartz1
image 2: Schwartz2
image 3: stem cells

Original post source

Modern healthcare is sick, but Dr. Daniel Kraft knows a little something about the cure. At the 2011 TEDMED conference in San Diego, the stem cell researcher gave a great overview on the emerging trends which are poised to play a big role in how medicine develops in the decades ahead. Mobile platforms, 24 hour at home monitoring, artificial intelligence, social networking, massive data collection, crowd-sourcing – Kraft expounds upon them all with his characteristic charm and humor. He even explains how lessons learned from aviation (checklists, simulations, heads-up displays) could help transform healthcare. With $2.4 trillion spent on medicine in the United States alone, there’s a huge incentive to make the industry faster, smarter, and more efficient. Kraft’s TEDMED presentation is a great guide to how humanity can make that happen. Don’t miss it below:

If you find yourself wanting to learn even more check out Dr. Kraft’s recent Q&A with Singularity Hub. Or think about attending the exciting FutureMed Executive Program at Singularity University in February, headed by Kraft and featuring some amazing innovators in the field of medicine.

[screen capture and video credit: TEDMED]

Original post source

Due to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, the prevalence of drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis is growing.

This is scary.

A report out of India identifies four new cases of tuberculosis that are completely resistant to drug treatment. They gave all four patients, ages ranging from 20 to 57, the full first-line and second-line batteries of drugs. The first-line included four to five drugs and the second-line five to six drugs for the patients. The drugs had no effect.

When study co-author Zarir Udwadia from the Hinduja National Hosptical and Medical Research Centre in Mumbai, spoke to the New Scientist he sounded like he was reading a script from a Hollywood movie. “It’s estimated that on average, a tuberculosis patient infects 10 to 20 contacts in a year, and there’s no reason to suspect that this strain is any less transmissible. Short of quarantining them in hospitals with isolation facilities till they become non-infectious – which is not practical or possible – there is nothing else one can do to prevent transmission.”

Udwadia says mismanagement of the multi-drug resistant strain by both the government and private care givers is to blame. The emergence of people with strains resistant to some or all drugs, however, is simply a natural and inevitable consequence of antibiotic use. But while we should brace ourselves for similar reports in the future, places like Mumbai have plenty of room for improvement if they want to stem the tide.

The 110,000 people in India with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are cared for by private practitioners. In a survey of 106 of them located in a Mumbai suburb, Udwadia concluded that only five private practitioners gave the proper prescription to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis patients. In fact, the four patients in the current study underwent analyses to determine prior treatment. The test revealed that three of the four had received “erratic, unsupervised second-line drugs, added individually and often in incorrect doses, from multiple private practitioners.” The patients received treatment from an average of four different physicians in an 18-month period in a desperate attempt to rid themselves of tuberculosis. According to the report, neither the prescription practices nor the qualifications of these private physicians is regulated.

And then there’s the cost. It costs just $20 to treat a patient with conventional tuberculosis. The drugs used to treat patients with the multidrug-resistant strain run between $2000 and $12,000.

Tuberculosis has already been a challenge for India. A World Health Organization report estimated that 110,132 multidrug-resistant tuberculoses cases arose India in 2006, accounting for 20 percent of worldwide cases. The report cites insufficient lab capacity as a major barrier to controlling the disease.

The four patients are the fourth group in recent years to have been found with completely drug-resistant tuberculosis. In 2007, two cases were reported in Italy. In 2009, 15 cases were reported in Iran. If this is a trend, and it’s probably prudent to assume it is, the world should be on guard. In particular, some countries of the former Soviet Union. What the WHO calls a “serious and widespread epidemic,” about 35 percent of all tuberculosis cases in these countries are multi drug-resistant, and about fifty percent are resistant to at least one drug. Also troubling is China with the second highest proportions of drug resistance. In 2006 China accounted for 25 percent of worldwide multidrug-resistant tuberculosis cases. In 2009, the United States reported just 113 cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

While multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is on the rise in some areas, the conventional disease is being treated effectively. Last year the WHO reported a drop in global tuberculosis cases from 9 million in 2005 to 8.8 million in 2010. Deaths also dropped from 1.8 million in 2003 to 1.4 million in 2010. Between 1990 and 2010 the death rate decreased 40 percent. In 2009, 87 percent of reported tuberculosis cases were cured.

Which makes the India cases all the more disheartening. Again antibiotics misuse rears its ugly head. Antibiotic use leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The susceptible bacteria is killed off while the resistant bacteria live to proliferate and infect another day.  Minsk, Belarus recently topped the charts when 15 percent of their multidrug-resistant population was shown to be extremely drug-resistant. There are some antibiotics used specifically to treat people with multidrug resistant tuberculosis. When those drugs are misused, the patients become resistant to even them, and become extremely drug-resistant. In 2007, about a dozen people in South Africa were diagnosed with extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis. They were sent on their contagious ways because the hospital didn’t have isolation wards.

So, where does this leave our highly interconnected world? Clinics haven’t actually run out of drugs just yet. Clofazimine and thioacetazone are two drugs that could potentially be used to treat the new form of totally resistant tuberculosis. The major drawback, though, are the drugs’ side effects. Clofazimine can cause discoloration of the skin, causing some patients to become depressed. In two cases, the patients committed suicide. And thioacetazone can cause the skin of people with HIV to peel off.

Another solution under consideration are sanatoriums, institutions in which patients and their immune systems do battle with the disease, quarantined safely away from the public. If that sounds familiar to you it’s because it was the best method for curing tuberculosis in the 19th century, long before antibiotics were discovered.

It wasn’t long ago that the WHO summarized the growing problem of anti-microbial resistance by saying, “The world is on the brink.” Well it certainly feels that way. An important question that, from where I’m sitting isn’t asked enough, is what really can be done about drug resistance? Tighter regulations and improved clinical practices will only slow the progression. Perhaps instead of focusing our efforts to stop their spread through policy, we should prepare for the inevitable and confront the daunting task of developing new antiobotics and new techniques to fight this terrible disease.

[image credits: Youth Ki Awaaz, Science Daily, and the World Health Organization]
image 1: India
image 2: Tuberculosis
image 3: graph

Original post source

Yoshiki Sasai's group induced embryonic stem cells to grow into the three-dimensionally complex pituitary.

Chalk up another part of the body that can be grown from stem cells – at least in mice. Scientists in Japan have induced mouse embryonic stem cells to form a pituitary in the lab. The team’s success not only holds promise for people with pituitary defects, but it’s another of just a few examples in which stem cells have been coaxed into a complex, three dimensional structure.

The pituitary is often referred to as the “master” gland of the endocrine system, as it secretes hormones that control the hormones secreted by other endocrine glands. It’s formation during embryonic development is closely tied to the hypothalamus, another important endocrine structure located close by at the base of the brain. The challenge to the Japanese researchers was to maintain the proper developmental environment for the nascent pituitary outside the brain. It was a complex challenge. They added hypothalamus tissue to the mix so that the stem cells would receive guiding signals from it, but the brain obviously consists of much more than these two areas. In order to “trick” the pituitary into thinking it was still in the brain, they also added several growth-inducing molecules including Sonic Hedgehog (it was discovered by a graduate student back when the game was popular) that are required for proper development in the brain. It worked. In just a couple weeks, the new structure not only looked like a pituitary, it produced all the major molecular markers that a normal pituitary produces. For the icing on the cake, the researchers placed the lab-grown pituitary into mice which had their own pituitaries destroyed. A week after transplantation, the mice showed increased blood levels of hormones produced by the pituitary.

The study was led by Yoshiki Sasai at the Riken Institute in Japan and was published in Nature.

The same researchers had previously used embryonic stem cells to from layers of the brain cortex.

The pituitary hormones regulate important physiological processes such as growth, puberty, and reproduction. A dysfunctional pituitary can lead to deficits in these hormones, which in turn can lead to disorders such as stunted growth, hypothyroidism, and infertility. Combined pituitary hormone deficiency affects about 1 in 3,000 to 4,000 live births. And although hormone-replacement therapy can be effective for many, it does not return hormone levels to their normal levels.

But don’t expect doctors to start replacing dysfunctional pituitaries with ones grown in the lab anytime soon. Most importantly, we’ll first need to see if the procedure can be repeated with human embryonic stem cells. And even now questions remain regarding the lab-grown mouse pituitaries. Embryonic stem cells differentiated in the lab don’t always run the course to full maturity. The pituitary in the current study still looks like the pituitary from an embryo. Only time will tell whether or not it can develop to an adult pituitary. But even if we can’t start swapping out dysfunctional pituitaries, the lab-grown structures should be a valuable tool for researchers studying pituitary defects. They can be looked at under a microscope and labeled with molecular markers, lending themselves to analyses far more difficult to perform in whole animals.

It could also pave the way for future stem cell research. The pituitary’s development in the study, as it is in normal development, was dependent on molecular signals sent from the hypothalamus. Now that the researchers have established that it is possible to run this inductive process, they have opened the door for the induction of even more complex organs in the lab.

The victories for regenerative medicine just keep on coming. Last year a group at UC Irvine in California successfully grew a retina from human embryonic stem cells. Like the pituitary, the retina needed to be grown with a specific three-dimensional organization in order to function properly. The starting clumps of stem cells required no intervention from the scientists to become retinas. The cell-to-cell communication during “development” was all they needed. Sasai’s group also induced embryonic stem cells to form a retina this past spring, although theirs was grown from mouse cells.

The group is currently working to improve transplantation of pituitary tissue in their mouse model. They’re also working on methods to repeat the experiment with human stem cells. Sasai expects it will be about three years to create a human pituitary. When they do, the field of regenerative medicine will be that much closer to its holy grail of growing all organs in the lab and transplanting them into humans.

[image credits: RIKEN]
image 1: cortex
image 2: Sasai

Original post source