Healthcare analytics, AI solutions for biological big data, providing an AI platform for the biotech, life sciences, medical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as for related technological approaches, i.e., curation and text analysis with machine learning and other activities related to AI applications to these industries.
For years, scientists have tried ineffectively to create an artificial molecule that emulates the oxygen-carrying function of human red blood cell but the efforts failed because of oxygen delivery and safety issues. Now, a group of researchers led by Dr. Alan Doctor at Washington University in Saint Louis, are trying to resuscitate blood substitutes with a new nanotechnology-based, artificial red blood cell may overcome the problems that killed products designed by a team of companies such as Biopure, Alliance Pharmaceuticals, Northfield Labs and even Baxter. Dr. Alan Doctor’s new company, Kalocyte is advancing the development of the
The donut-shaped artificial cells, ErythroMer are one-fiftieth the size of human red blood cells. ErythroMer is a novel blood substitute composed of a patented nanobialys nanoparticle. A special lining and control system tied to changes in blood Ph allows Erythromer to grab onto oxygen in the lungs and then dispense the oxygen in tissues where it is needed. The new artificial cells are intended to sidestep problems with vasoconstriction or narrowing of blood vessels.
Erythromer is stored freeze dried and reconstituted with water when needed but it can also be stored at room temperature which makes it for military and civilian trauma.
Trials have been successful in rats, mice, and rabbits, and human trials are planned. However, moving Erythromer into human clinical trials is still 8-10 years away.
Current advances have allowed 3D printing of biocompatible materials, cells and supporting components into complex 3D functional living tissues. 3D bioprinting has already been used for the generation and transplantation of several tissues, including multilayered skin, bone, vascular grafts, tracheal splints, heart tissue and cartilaginous structures. Thanks to 3D printing, an Australian man got to keep his leg. The man, Reuben Lichter nearly lost his leg above the knee due to a bacterial infection. Doctors told him that he had osteomyelitis which infected his entire bone. Lichter’s bacterial disease of osteomyelitis affects 2 in every 10,000 people in the United States. He had two choices: an experimental procedure using the 3D printed bone or lose his leg. For Lichter, the choice was easy.
Michael Wagels who served as the lead surgeon performed the world’s first-ever transplant surgery using a 3D printed bone. The scaffold was initially modeled at Queensland University of Technology. Biomedical engineers designed the scaffold to promote bone growth around it and then slowly dissolve over time. To have the body successfully grow around the scaffold, the team introduced tissue and blood vessels from both of Lichter’s legs to the scaffold. The surgery itself happened over five operations at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital.
However, the next major challenge for biomedical engineers is how to successfully 3D print organs.
New research from California Institute of Technology headed by Anupama Thubagere and Lulu Qian built robots from DNA and programmed them to sort and deliver molecules to a specified location. These robots can potentially transform the drug delivery field to how body fights infections to how microscopic measurements are made. The dominant premise of DNA robots is that rather than creating molecular devices from scratch, we can use the power of molecular machinery by building microscopic-size robots and send them to places that are then impossible to reach, such as a cell or a hard-to-reach cancerous tumor. These robots demonstrated the ability to perform simple tasks, however this latest effort ramped up a path by programming DNA robots to perform a cargo‐sorting task and possibly many other tasks.
Each robot was built from a single-stranded DNA molecule of just 53 nucleotides equipped with “legs” for walking and “arms” for picking up objects. The robot are 20 nanometers tall and their walking strides measures six nanometers long, where one nanometer is a billionth of a meter. For the cargo, the researchers used two types of molecules, each being a distinct single-stranded piece of DNA. For the tests, the researchers placed the cargo onto a random location along the surface of a two-dimensional origami DNA test platform. The walking DNA robots moved in parallel along this surface, hunting for their cargo.
To see if a robot successfully picked up and dropped off the right cargo at the right location, the researchers used two fluorescent dyes to differentiate the molecules.
The researchers guess that each DNA robot took around 300 steps to complete its task, or roughly ten times more than in previous efforts. Though, more work is needed to figure out how these DNA robots perform under different environmental conditions. This new study suggests a worthwhile methodology for scientists to continue pursuing.
3-D Printing in Water using Novel Hybrid Nanoparticles
Reporter: Irina Robu, PhD
3D printing has become an essential tool for fabricating different organic based materials, but printing structures in water has been thought-provoking due to lack of water soluble molecules known as photo initiators. The photo initiator can induce chemical reactions needed to form solid printed material by light. However, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology have developed a new type of photo initiator for three-dimensional printing in water. This innovative nanoparticle allows the creating of bio-friendly 3D structures.
By 3D printing in water, it also opens up the digital light processing method to medical applications, leading toward a competitive response for patient specific implants and tissues because the photo initiators cause rapid solidification of a liquid material that can create faster reactions when exposed to light. 3D printing in water opens up innovative ways for tailored fabrication of medical devices and for printing hydrogels or bio-scaffolds that are typical used in tissue engineering.
The challenge of 3D printing in water is finding an initiator that is not consumed by irradiation. However, unlike regular photo initiators, the novel hybrid nanoparticles developed by Prof. Magdassi present tunable properties, wide excitation window in the UV and visible range, high light sensitivity, and their ability to split water, and absorb oxygen molecules that typically inhibit the performance of the process. The particles added as photo initiator are semi conductive hybrid nanoparticles and are used to create high resolution 3D objects at sub-microscopic scale.
Therefore, 3-D printing in water could allow personalized fabrication of joint replacements, heart valves, artificial tendons and ligaments etc.
Amol Ashok Pawar et al. Rapid Three-Dimensional Printing in Water Using Semiconductor–Metal Hybrid Nanoparticles as Photoinitiators, Nano Letters (2017)
Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have completed the first-ever characterization of the meticulously timed immune system changes in women that occur during pregnancy. The findings were published in Science Immunology revealed that there is an immune clock of pregnancy and suggest it may help doctors predict preterm birth.
The timing of immune system changes follows a precise and predictable pattern in normal pregnancy. Although physicians have long known that the expectant mother’s immune system adjusts to prevent her body from rejecting the fetus, no one had investigated the full scope of these changes, nor asked if their timing was tightly controlled.
Nearly 10 percent of U.S. infants are born prematurely, arriving three or more weeks early, but physicians lack a reliable way to predict premature deliveries. Previous research at Stanford and other places suggested that inflammatory immune responses may help in triggering early labor. It suggested that if scientists identify an immune signature of impending preterm birth, they should be able to design a blood test to detect it.
The researchers used mass cytometry, a technique developed at Stanford, to simultaneously measure up to 50 properties of each immune cell in the blood samples. They counted the types of immune cells, assessed what signaling pathways were most active in each cell, and determined how the cells reacted to being stimulated with compounds that mimic infection with viruses and bacteria.
The researchers developed an algorithm that captures the immunological timeline during pregnancy that both validates previous findings and sheds new light on immune cell interaction during gestation. By defining this immunological chronology during normal term pregnancy, they can now begin to determine which alterations associate with pregnancy-related pathologies.
With an advanced statistical modeling technique, introduced for the first time in this study, the scientists then described in detail how the immune system changes throughout pregnancy. Instead of grouping the women’s blood samples by trimester for analysis, the model treated gestational age as a continuous variable, allowing the researchers to account for the exact time during pregnancy at which each sample was taken. The mathematical model also incorporated knowledge from the existing scientific literature of how immune cells behave in nonpregnant individuals to help determine which findings were most likely to be important.
The study confirmed immune features of pregnancy that were already known. Such as the scientists saw that natural killer cells and neutrophils have enhanced action during pregnancy. The researchers also uncovered several previously unappreciated features of how the immune system changes, such as the finding that activity of the STAT5 signaling pathway in CD4+T cells progressively increases throughout pregnancy on a precise schedule, ultimately reaching levels much higher than in nonpregnant individuals. The STAT5 pathway is involved in helping another group of immune cells, regulatory T cells, to differentiate. Interestingly, prior research in animals has indicated that regulatory T cells are important for maintaining pregnancy.
The next step will be to conduct similar research using blood samples from women who deliver their babies prematurely to see where their trajectories of immune function differ from normal.
This study revealed a precisely timed chronology of immune adaptations in peripheral blood over the course of a term pregnancy. This finding was enabled by high-content, single-cell mass cytometry coupled with a csEN algorithm accounting for the modular structure of the immune system and previous knowledge. The study provided the conceptual backbone and the analytical framework to examine whether disruption of this chronology is a diagnostically useful characteristic of preterm birth and other pregnancy-related pathologies.
Teva enticed Schultz with a pay and welcome package worth up to $52 million, including $20 million in cash upfront, according to an SEC filing on the Monday hire. The new helmsman will also receive a restricted stock award of $5 million and two performance unit stock awards each worth $7.5 million.
Schultz’s base salary is $2 million, with an annual bonus opportunity worth 140% to 200% of his salary. Under the agreement, he’ll also receive $6 million in annual equity incentives.
For Teva, the pay will be well worth it if Schultz is able to engineer a turnaround. The Israeli drugmaker has had its stock price and business prospects battered over the last year as the generic pricing environment worsens and other threats continue to unfold. Knowing the challenges the company faced, Teva’s board said during the search that it was looking for a world-class pharma vet.
And Schultz has fixed things at an ailing drugmaker before. After Lundbeck’s former CEO stepped down and as it was laboring to launch new meds, it hired Schultz in 2015. He had already made a name for himself during a long tenure at Novo Nordisk and during his two years at Lundbeck, he won praise for improving revenue and profits.
If ranked among last year’s top-paid pharma executives, Schultz package would place him at No. 3, behind Mylan chairman Robert Coury’s $97 million and Valeant CEO Joseph Papa’s $62.7 million. Like Schultz, Papa also joined a drugmaker suffering from a barrage of negative developments in recent years.
Aside from tough pricing on generics, Teva is also dealing with a price fixing investigation and a generic threat to key multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. The company recently kicked off a restructuring set to affect 7,000 employees around the world after its $40.5 billion buyout of Allergan’s generic business became more of a drag than a boost for the company.
Teva names Danish veteran Kare Schultz as new CEO, Compensation: $52M package that makes him among pharma’s top paid
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the world’s biggest seller of generics medicines, named Kare Schultz as its new chief executive, choosing an industry veteran to navigate a series of daunting challenges, from falling drug prices to the company’s high debt.
The appointment of Mr. Schultz, a Dane, ends a months-long period during which Teva had no permanent top executive. It recently shuffled its board and is shedding assets, while coping with new competitors. Teva shares have been under pressure for months.
The new chief executive joins from Denmark’s H. Lundbeck A/S, where he was president and CEO since May 2015. He has also worked as chief operating officer of Novo Nordisk A/S, the world’s biggest producer of insulin.
17th Annual EmTech @ Media Lab, MIT – November 7 – 8, 2017, Cambridge, MA – This Year’s Themes, Speakers and Agenda
Article ID #243: LIVE Day Two and Day One – 17th Annual EmTech @ Media Lab, MIT – November 7 – 8, 2017, Cambridge, MA – This Year’s Themes, Speakers and Agenda. Published on 9/8/2017
Angella Schoellig — Roborts, Prof. University of Toronto, robots in predictable environments
Lorenz Meier — Vertical Technologies – Drones and safety – DB of flights
12:30
Lunch & Networking
2:00
Adapting to the reality of climate change
Lee Krevat, Sempra –
owns Wind Farms- managing a Grid with renewable energy. Variable – Wind technology wind is variable – if wind blows too much switch to diesel. 100% renewable for one hour on Islands
Growth area:
20 cents diesel, wind is 10 cents help the enviroment
mainland, not yet used, price diesel vs wind
Solar wind generation – next biggest Technology in Energy
and
Alex Tepper,Avetars
Robotics, Drones, AI and the Future of Energy – A start up incubator sponsored and funded by GE
RAIL – Predict derailments
OIL & GAS – corrosion is the enemy — knowledge of corosion progression – using AI algorithms
Growth area: Aviation
John Holdren – Harvard University – Government Role in ENERGY and Climate Change – Obama’s advisor Presidential CSO on Climate and energy
mitigation
adaptation
suffering – shortcomings of mitigation and adaptation
harm of business as usual
Efficiency standards during Obama Administration, assistance to other countries led to the Agreement in Paris 195 countirs — agreement to reduce emission. China and US declare cooperation on emission of gases into the environment.
PRESIDENT TRUMPS CALLED CLIMATE CHANGE A HOAX – proposed to cut energy R&D
All executive orders by Obama – were reverted by Trump
Innovations: Electricity from Solar increase and wind as well and batteries
Carbon capture and storage – technological challenge
Biofuel processing, liquid bio fuel
Nuclear innovations to nuclear waste
2100 – 5% on defense and 2% on the environment – model under estimate the contribution of innovations for the long run.
1000 businesses in deployment of technologies
Evelyn wang, MIT – Material Science – Sustainable energy – nano
material properties: superior properties of LOW DENSITIES
Light manipulation
membrane
CO2 capture
Technologies: Nnao, Thermoelectronics, energy and water
Solar 6% and wind 21%, biomass 5%voltaic
SOlar eneconversion
PHOVOLTAIC: SCALBALE, SOLID STATE, INTERMITTENT, PARTIAL SOLAR SPECTRUMrgy
Nanophotonics: Solar energy conversion: photo
Nano absorber – area ratio; Emitter: silicon and silicon – spectral approach
potential STPVs
Transportation using energy with emission
Power consumed by HVAC
Thermal Battery for Electric Vehicle: Adsorption Heating and Cooling
Desorption vs Adsoption: cooling vs Heating mode
High capacity adsobents – Zeolite MOF enhancing capacity heat and mass transport
Credential Stuffing Accounts Attacks – SONY was hacked and 93,000 Passwords stolen
Clip Farms at Google
BLACKFISH – identify Credential Stuffing Accounts Attacks, all invalid password are not valid to be used by cyber attackers again – that authentication is no longer valid
Multi Factors Authentications vs ease of use to Log In
Knowledge Basis – Probabilistic SYmbols – BlackFISH – technological advantage – iPhone stores a math formulation of characteristics of the finger print not the image of the fingure
Brain Computer Interaction (BCI) – maximum Privacy no voice involved like in SPeech
Voice, Motion Tracking, eye tracking
Human intentionality – a World without limitations
NASA is a client
consol technology for navigation, typing,
Problems: Add to glasses or as an Ear piece
the signal is ACTION POTENTIAL
latency differences between individuals
Non-invasive to invasive to capture signals
2:00 – 2:30 Capturing Our Imagination:: Evolution of Brain-Machine Interfaces
Mary Lou Jepsen, Openwater
Hosted by Antonio Ragalado, TR
Using functional MRI technology for a NEW device to scan emotions rather than medical diseases
HOLOGRAPHY of the Brain – liquid crystal display is like transistors on a chip
OPTICS – DISCONTINUITY of Moore’s law – high resolution like functional MRI
Holographic LCD – scattering material VOXEL detector – measure intensity of light, no resolution, consumer camera speed OK Inexpensive
Human body scattering
HAT and Bandage
2:30 – 3PM Future of Work – REWARD DISOBEDIENCE –
New Prize of $250,000 – Ethics and governance in AI at MIT Media lab
Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners Founder LinkedIn
conversation with Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab
Tell the Truth
Media Lab — a Non-disciplinary place
Universities play a role in Social Justice
FEAR of AI:
For profit will own it all
stupid AI will govern
displace work
espionage
catalytic institute that will make a contribution to OPENNESS vs technological dominance
Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab: AI problems –
MUST be democratized – Now it is in the hands of very FEW
RISK SCORES can’t be contested in court because they are IP of for profit companies
Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab at MIT do good to Society vs make the most of money which the majority are doing
AUTONOMICH vs autonomous agents, said Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab – Hoffman: Design goals more symbiotic: Scaling, more productive, Season 2 launched today
Design principle – LEARNING vs EDUCATION, Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab
Hoffman on AI Technologies
shaping it to avoid catastrophic negatives
provide a public good via participation
3:00
Break & Networking
3:30 – 4 Big Problems, Big Data Solutions
Deb Roy, MIT media Lab
Tweets and News, Washington Post – Tracking tweets from US on Politics related to the Elections
National memory on Guns, Immigrations
Debate brief from tweets and News rooms
topic classifier, Campaign finance, SHARE OF COVERAGE IN NEWS, SHARED OF VOICE ON TWITTER
deep neural network training algorithms
Passion Gap: cut data on Twitter – Trump supporters exhibited x2 fold energy vs the Democratic candidate
How does Media flow: Sanders, Clinton, Trump – each is a Media Source
Truth, Trust, Attention – Fact checking
If Trust the source then I believe it is True
Public Opinion: The Politics of Resentment in Rural WI – Katherine Cramer
Listening Networks: Human- Human Interaction: Media sharing network – change week by week – the MOST innovative methodology developed to date for Public Opinion – presentation by
Deb Roy, MIT media Lab – using deep Neural network training
main stream
conservative
liberal activist
Health Indicators:
Shared attention
Shared Reality
Varied Perspective – surface under-heard voices
3:30 – 4
Meet the Innovators Under 35
1. Svenja Hinderer, Germany
Valve – development of Tissues, biochemical properties
signaling molecules
mechanical strength – physiological
Attrach stem cells – proper matrix formation
Functional implants
2. Viktor Adalsteinsson
Cancer Precision medicine – Liquid biopsy – tumor mutations
cell-free DNA (cfDNA) tests could become the ultimate “Molecular Stethoscope” that opens up a whole new way of practicing Medicine
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
The first commercial application of cfDNA sequencing debuted in 2011. New blood tests can identify Down’s syndrome and similar genetic conditions during the first months of pregnancy by checking the fetal DNA in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman. (Anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood comes from the placenta, which is genetically similar to the fetus.) These maternal blood tests are fast replacing less-accurate procedures, such as ultrasound plus blood analysis.
More recently, researchers have started looking at cfDNA to develop so-called liquid biopsies, which analyze a tumor’s genetic makeup or look for evidence of a cancer recurrence. Tumors often spill DNA into the blood as they grow and divide, and because they are usually riddled with mutations, their scrambled DNA is clearly different from that found in normal DNA fragments. The first liquid biopsy test was launched only three years ago; although they are not yet part of routine care, the field is growing quickly. One company says it will give liquid biopsy tests to one million people in the next five years, and another has raised nearly $1 billion for its studies.
A similar cfDNA method is being tested for newly transplanted organs, which are at risk of being rejected by the recipient’s immune system. Currently, transplant doctors check a transplanted organ’s health by performing repeated biopsies, which are expensive and invasive. After a transplant small amounts of donor DNA from the new heart or kidney, for example, circulate in the blood as part of the normal process of cell birth and death. If the host immune system attacks the foreign organ, the proportion of donor DNA increases as more and more foreign cells die. One company, CareDx, already sells a test that picks up on that change for people who have had kidney transplants.
The researchers invented a way to boost the signal by reducing human DNA in blood samples. Their spin-off company, Karius, launched a test earlier this year to identify bacteria, fungi, viruses or parasites in hospitalized patients. It can spot infections in organs that are too dangerous for biopsies, including the lung and the brain, Kertesz says—and it is most useful for people with mystery infections or who are too sick to endure a surgery.
cell-free DNA tests in the future include stroke, or autoimmune conditions such as lupus
SOURCE
One Test May Spot Cancer, Infections, Diabetes and More
Researchers are starting to diagnose more ailments using DNA fragments found in the blood
Understanding of the Brain Basis of Emotion: Capture the Emotional States that underlie Moods, Brain Activity and Expressive Signals – Berkeley Study in PNAS
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients
Claims about how reported emotional experiences are geometrically organized within a semantic space have shaped the study of emotion. Using statistical methods to analyze reports of emotional states elicited by 2,185 emotionally evocative short videos with richly varying situational content, we uncovered 27 varieties of reported emotional experience. Reported experience is better captured by categories such as “amusement” than by ratings of widely measured affective dimensions such as valence and arousal. Although categories are found to organize dimensional appraisals in a coherent and powerful fashion, many categories are linked by smooth gradients, contrary to discrete theories. Our results comprise an approximation of a geometric structure of reported emotional experience.
Abstract
Emotions are centered in subjective experiences that people represent, in part, with hundreds, if not thousands, of semantic terms. Claims about the distribution of reported emotional states and the boundaries between emotion categories—that is, the geometric organization of the semantic space of emotion—have sparked intense debate. Here we introduce a conceptual framework to analyze reported emotional states elicited by 2,185 short videos, examining the richest array of reported emotional experiences studied to date and the extent to which reported experiences of emotion are structured by discrete and dimensional geometries. Across self-report methods, we find that the videos reliably elicit 27 distinct varieties of reported emotional experience. Further analyses revealed that categorical labels such as amusement better capture reports of subjective experience than commonly measured affective dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal). Although reported emotional experiences are represented within a semantic space best captured by categorical labels, the boundaries between categories of emotion are fuzzy rather than discrete. By analyzing the distribution of reported emotional states we uncover gradients of emotion—from anxiety to fear to horror to disgust, calmness to aesthetic appreciation to awe, and others—that correspond to smooth variation in affective dimensions such as valence and dominance. Reported emotional states occupy a complex, high-dimensional categorical space. In addition, our library of videos and an interactive map of the emotional states they elicit (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html) are made available to advance the science of emotions.
Three separate groups of study participants watched sequences of videos, and, after viewing each clip, completed a reporting task. The first group freely reported their emotional responses to each of 30 video clips.
“Their responses reflected a rich and nuanced array of emotional states, ranging from nostalgia to feeling ‘grossed out,’” Cowen said.
The second group ranked each video according to how strongly it made them feel admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, contempt, craving, disappointment, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, envy, excitement, fear, guilt, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, pride, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, surprise, sympathy and triumph.
Here, the experimenters found that participants converged on similar responses, with more than half of the viewers reporting the same category of emotion for each video.
The final cohort rated their emotional responses on a scale of 1 to 9 to each of a dozen videos based on such dichotomies as positive versus negative, excitement versus calmness, and dominance versus submissiveness. Researchers were able to predict how participants would score the videos based on how previous participants had assessed the emotions the videos elicited.
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Human nature is often portrayed as selfish and power hungry, but research by Dacher Keltner finds that we are hard-wired to be kind. Credit: Fig. 1 by University of California
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