|
|
|
|
| SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY |
|
|
|
Patients treated with cells from human embryo Steve Connor  TWO blind persons have shown signs of being able to see again — despite having incurable eye disease — following a revolutionary operation involving the transplant of stem cells derived from a human embryo.Three persons are the first wave of patients to receive controversial transplants of embryonic cells as part of an ambitious attempt to treat a range of incurable diseases with stem cell Touchscreen that works inside your pockets too Trends Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE |
|
|
Once they were blind, now they see TWO blind persons have shown signs of being able to see again — despite having incurable eye disease — following a revolutionary operation involving the transplant of stem cells derived from a human embryo. A third patient, a Yorkshire man who volunteered to take part in a similar trial in Britain, had a similar transplant operation involving the injection of embryonic stem cells into the damaged retina at the back of the eye. The three persons are the first wave of patients to receive controversial transplants of embryonic cells as part of an ambitious attempt to treat a range of incurable diseases with stem cells that have the power to develop into any of the dozens of specialised tissues of the body. The two American patients, who each received transplants in just one of their eyes last year, have not shown any signs of serious side effects, such as tissue rejection or the development of tumours, according to a study. One of the patients, a woman in her 50s, suffers from Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, a progressive disease of the central retina that usually strikes between the ages of 10 and 20. The other, a woman in her 70s, has age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the developed world. Although both patients have exceptionally poor vision and are legally registered as blind, their sight in the treated eye seems to have improved slightly following the transplants, even though their disease is at an advanced stage and was not expected to recover. The Stargardt’s patient went from only being able to see hand movements to being able to see the movements of fingers, while the age-related patient went from being able to see 21 letters on a reading chart to seeing 28 letters. “Despite the progressive nature of these conditions, the vision of both patients appears to have improved after transplantation of the cells, even at the lowest dosage,” said Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts company that supplied the cells. “This is particularly important, since the ultimate goal of this therapy will be to treat patients earlier in the course of the disease where more significant results might potentially be expected,” Dr Lanza said. In a separate clinical trial being conducted in Britain, a 34-year-old Yorkshire man suffering from Stargardt’s disease underwent an embryonic stem cell transplant in his right eye at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Professor Douglas Bainbridge, a consultant surgeon at Moorfields, said the operation was deliberately carried out on the patient’s worst eye in order to minimise the risk to his overall vision. There were no adverse reactions and the patient was allowed to travel back to his home in Wakefield recently. “There were no complications and the patient tolerated the surgical procedure well. We will be regularly monitoring the patient to follow the safety and tolerability of these transplanted cells,” Professor Bainbridge said. “While this is still primarily a safety trial, we will also have the opportunity to assess any changes in visual function in the treated eye and look for signs that the injected (cells) engrafted in the retina,” he said. Macular degeneration involves the progressive loss of cells in the retinal epithelium, the tissue layer that supports and protects the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. Patients with macular degeneration lose their central vision, which is important for reading and recognising faces. “It is hoped that cell transplants might play a role in protecting people from sight loss in the future. This is a very early, small step in the development of a new, effective intervention,” Professor Bainbridge said. “This is a safety trial so we are deliberately going for patients with advanced sight impairment to limit the possible damage from the stem-cell transplants. In future we’ll be looking to recruit less advanced patients,” he said. Up to 12 patients with Stargardt’s disease will be recruited into the phase one safety trial in Britain, which is being run from Moorfields and Aberdeen. Different doses of stem cells will be compared for safety in preparation for a phase two clinical trial designed to assess whether the therapy can significantly restore vision. The only other phase one clinical trial of human embryonic stem cells was designed to test their safety on patients with spinal cord injury. However, the trial was abandoned last November when the American biotechnology firm Geron announced it was pulling out of the entire field over financial concerns.
— The Independent
|
||
|
Touchscreen that works inside your pockets too RESEARCHERS have developed a prototype for a touchscreen that can allow its users to send text messages even when it is kept inside a jacket or pants pocket. The stealthy screen works when it is touched through the fabric, whether it is silk, cotton or even thick fleece, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. In classes or meetings of the future, with your hands tucked underneath the conference table or desk, the user may rest a fingertip tactfully on the pocket that holds the touch screen and handle a call by tracing a message like “Running late. In a mtg.” on the fabric above the hidden screen. The touch screen will comprehend the message — it has a program to decode handwriting, even of the scrawling sort. So even while a person is writing on his pocket, he can maintain polite eye contact with the group, no longer betrayed by those telltale downward gazes necessary to text with a standard screen. The technology, called PocketTouch, is the brainchild of Microsoft researchers Scott Saponas and Hrvoje Benko with Chris Harrison, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The prototype uses sensors similar to those used in most touch screens, and is mounted on the back of a smartphone case. “There are a lot of situations where this technology could be useful,” said Jeffrey Bigham, an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester, who chaired a conference panel on computer user interfaces where PocketTouch was demonstrated. “It’s a way to send short messages when it is not socially appropriate to fish out your device,” he said, or in many other instances when people simply don’t want to go to the trouble of removing a device from a pocket. “Most touch screens are calibrated in a static way, only responding to direct touch with a finger, and rejecting a slightly different signal,” Benko added. On the contrary, PocketTouch calibrates continuously, adapting to different kinds of fabrics. — ANI
|
||
|
Trends
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: NASA intends to cancel plans to join Europe on a Mars sampling mission that is considered important to learning if life appeared beyond Earth as the US space agency balances out a virtually flat $17.7 billion budget for 2013, officials said. NASA's proposal leaves Europe without a key partner for a proposed two-spacecraft mission to collect and return soil samples from Mars. The so-called Exobiology on Mars, or ExoMars, probes are targeted to launch in 2016 and 2018. Race is on to find life under Antarctic ice sheet MOSCOW: The race is on to discover life in the most remote and extreme environment known on Earth. Russia has set the pace, piercing through Antarctica's icy crust to reach a freshwater lake to try to find ancient or new kinds of life that have adapted to the extremely cold, sunless climate and may shed light on the origins of evolution. — Reuters
|
||
|
THIS UNIVERSE Let me try to find a reason for why we have two eyes facing forward. You would notice that our two eyes are so placed that while viewing a scene, each of our eyes sees at least some part of the scene simultaneously. Since the eyes are not exactly at the same place, all three-dimensional objects present slightly different aspects to the two eyes. We have a rather clever and sophisticated analysis system in our brain that makes use of the difference in the scene to give us a measure of depth. In other words, we get a three-dimensional image! This would be recognised as a great advantage of the viewing system given to us. In commonly used terminology, we say that we get astereoscopic picture. You might not be satisfied by adequacy of this choice and demand multiple eyes in all direction. I think it would be intelligent to pay attention to the disadvantages of needless redundancy. Why do identical twins have different fingerprints? This is an interesting question that clearly shows that even with identical genes we can have differences that are contributed by environment, which can never be exactly the same as the individuals grow and develop. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at
palyash.pal@gmail.com
|
