Here is the latest batch of news from the medical products community. Please click the link for more.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) involves an immune system attack against the central nervous system and causes progressive paralysis by destroying nerve cells and the spinal cord. It interrupts vision, balance, and even thinking. Although there is still no cure, there are some medications and alternative treatments that may...

A team of engineers at the University of Colorado at Boulder say that they have successfully added a fourth dimension to their printing technology, opening up exciting possibilities for the creation and use of adaptive, composite materials in manufacturing, packaging, and biomedical applications.

While sutures have evolved over millennia, and catgut gave way to synthetics for stitching up injuries and surgical wounds, the basic process of suturing tissue remains the same. However, the method may finally have become outdated, say a team of researchers at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY.

Researchers at Kiel University, Kiel, Germany, have been studying the role of adhesion in nature, which allows insects and lizards to climb walls, plants to twine up structures, and even bacteria cling to surfaces. During evolution, many of these develop mushroom-shaped adhesive structures and organs,...

According to a study of 69,000 Medicare patient records led by researchers at The Johns Hopkins Hospital's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Spine Outcomes Research Center, people with spine compression fractures who undergo operations to strengthen back bones with cement survive...

A small, wireless capsule has been developed by a team of doctors and engineers at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, that, they say, can restore the sense of touch that surgeons are losing as they shift increasingly from open to laparoscopy or minimally invasive surgery.

While most artificial feet and limbs work well to restore mobility to people who have lost a leg, few provide a natural gait. As a result, more than half of all amputees suffer a fall every year, compared to about one-third of people over age 65. To find a better way of restoring natural motion to artificial...

A study by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), New York, NY, researchers suggests that narrow-spectrum ultraviolet (UV) light could dramatically reduce surgical infections without damaging human tissue.

New research at the University of Chicago is laying the groundwork for touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs that one day could convey real-time sensory information to amputees via a direct interface with the brain.

The world’s largest smartphone chipmaker, Qualcomm, says it wants to start helping partners manufacture a radically different kind of a chip—a neuro-inspired chip that mimics the neural structures and processing methods found in the brain. This approach could enable machines to perform complex tasks while consuming...

Here is the latest batch of news from the medical products community. Please click the link for more.

A team of scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington used mathematical modeling to develop a computer simulation that they hope will one day improve the treatment of dangerous reactions to medical implants such as stents, catheters, and artificial joints.

The silk of the venomous brown recluse spider could be the key to creating new super-sticky films and wafer-thin electronics and sensors for medical implants that are highly compatible with the human body. So says a team of scientists from Oxford University, UK, and The College of William and Mary,...

An indefinite shutdown of the US government has caused the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to severely limit its activities related to new medical device registrations. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services as well as an email from the FDA, the agency will have no legal authority...

Measuring blood flow in the laboratory to study ailments like migraines or strokes and designing new ways to address them can be accomplished using laser speckle contrast imaging. However, this requires expensive professional-grade imaging equipment. Researchers at the University of Texas at...

Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes, say researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to...

New York, NY – ChemoPatch, a low-cost, disposable, electronic patch-based cancer chemotherapy device designed to be simple, automated, and easy-to-use by cancer patients outside of the hospital, has been awarded the grand prize of $20,000 in the 2013...

Laser-based technology could make brain tumor surgery more accurate by allowing surgeons to better identify cancer tissue from normal brain tissue at a microscopic level during surgery. This could allow them to avoid leaving behind cells that could spawn a new tumor, say a team of...

The microbead packing is the critical element required in the success of onchip microfabrication of critical microfluidic components for in-situ analysis and detection of chiral amino acids. In order for microliquid chromatography to occur, there must be a stationary phase...

The school year has barely begun and what are students up to? Pretty amazing things, if they’re anything like the students who won grants from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). Grants are also awarded to faculty who ignite a passion for innovation and entrepreneurship...