Mass produced artificial skin to replace animal testing

Doctors have been using synthetic skin for grafts and repairs for years now, but the process to create synthetic skin is expensive and time-consuming.

Now, a team from Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute have created a way to mass-produce artificial skin (complete with blood vessels) that can be used for grafts, plastic surgery, or even cosmetics testing.

Indeed, in addition to providing new skin to burn victims, these swatches of artificial skin can take the place of animals in medical and cosmetic testing. And since the swatches can be made to contain blood vessels as well as skin cells, scientists can run circulatory as well as skin-related experiments on them.

The system is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product.

The basic skin production system, which may be available as early as next year, can produce 5,000 swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around US$49 to produce -- considerably less than the current cost.

More.

Meet your next surgeon: The RIO Robotic Arm

MAKO Surgical recently announced the release of its RIO Robotic Arm Interactive Orthopedic System.

While the device is strictly intended for knee resurfacing operations, the RIO may be a sign of things to come; robots like RIO may be increasingly utilized in complex surgeries. Knee resurfacing is a notoriously difficult operation to perform and it is hoped that the RIO robot will introduce stability and precision.

The device is not completely autonomous. It is designed to assist surgeons during knee resurfacing operations, a minimally invasive type of surgery thought to be useful for younger, active patients with early osteoarthritis.


According to MAKO:

MAKO’s robotic arm system is the first FDA-cleared robotic arm system for orthopedic surgery. It provides patient-specific, three-dimensional modeling for pre-surgical planning. As surgeons use the robotic arm to resurface the knee for placement of the implants, RIO™ provides real-time inter-operative visual, tactile and auditory feedback, enabling a high level of precision and optimal positioning of the implants.

MAKOplasty® provides the potential for improved surgical outcomes, with a less invasive partial knee resurfacing procedure that spares healthy bone and tissue, preserves ligaments and allows for a more rapid recovery and a more natural feeling knee.

Sure, looks fancy -- but what about its bedside manner?

Via Medgadget.

150 years of enhancment

Think human enhancement is something new? Hardly. We are by definition the tool making species and have been overcoming our biological limitations for quite some time now.

Take, for example, the British Medical Journal's assessment of the greatest medical advancements since 1840. They listed 10 different breakthroughs, most of which have a definite 'enhancement' quality. Listed below are the advancements along with my commentary:

Sanitation: cleaner, safer environments create stronger immune systems and healthier humans

Antibiotics: giving people the capacity to better fight bacterial infections

Anesthesia: allows surgeons do to more intense and invasive work on their patients while the patients themselves are spared intense physcial pain and psychological anguish

The double-stranded structure of DNA: human genomics for the purpose of eliminating genetic diseases and for eventual work on genetic modification

Oral contraceptive pill: to bypass our reproductive processes and convert the sex act into a recreational activity

Germ theory (the idea that micro-organisms cause disease): knowing how disease spreads changes human habits and therapeutic approaches

Vaccines: creating superhuman immune systems

Development of imaging techniques: human have x-ray vision to peer inside the human body; with fMRIs, humans can see the active parts of the brain

Immunology: the study of diseases for the purpose of treating and tracking them, and to eventually eradicate them

Computers: to disseminate knowledge and expertise, to link experts together, inform patients, run simulations, crunch numbers, archive deep databases -- all to further the medical sciences