British physicist Stephen Hawking, shown here during a 2016 interview with Larry King, is almost completely paralyzed due to ALS but still leads an active professional life (Credit: Ora.TV)
Revalesio, a biomedical company headquartered in Tacoma, Wash., says it’s been cleared to benefit from federal incentives for the development of a drug that could help treat a neurodegenerative disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
ALS is known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, but today’s most famous patient is British physicist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with the malady more than 50 years ago.
The disease affects 12,000 to 15,000 patients in the U.S., and an estimated 6,000 Americans are diagnosed with ALS every year.
A 3-D-printed viewing box holds a smartphone in place to take a picture of the user’s eyes. The BiliScreen app analyzes the eye image to look for signs of jaundice, which could point to pancreatic cancer. (University of Washington Photo / Dennis Wise)
University of Washington researchers have created a smartphone app that can let users screen themselves for pancreatic cancer and other diseases by taking a selfie.
But not just any selfie.
The BiliScreen app is designed to focus in on the whites of your eyes. If your whites have an overly yellowish tinge, that could suggest you have increased levels of a compound known as bilirubin. That’s a sign of jaundice, and also one of the earliest indicators of pancreatic cancer.
The first effects on the whites of a person’s eyes, also known as the sclera, are too subtle to be noticeable to the naked eye. Heightened levels typically show up in blood tests, but the UW team says BiliScreen can serve as an effective, low-cost, low-impact screening tool.
Zipline’s drones have been delivering blood supplies for months in Rwanda. (Zipline Photo)
While Amazon continues testing drone delivery systems for popcorn and other consumer goods, a startup called Zipline is expanding its fully operational medical drone delivery system from Rwanda to Tanzania to serve a desperate global health need.
Today Tanzanian health officials announced that they’ll launch what may well rank as the world’s largest drone delivery service in the first quarter of 2018.
When the system is up and running, fixed-wing drones will make up to 2,000 deliveries a day to more than 1,000 health facilities that serve 10 million people, according to a news release issued by California-based Zipline.
Viome CEO Naveen Jain shows how a stool sample would be placed into a kit for an analysis of gut microbes. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Viome, the wellness monitoring service founded by Seattle-area tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, has raised $15 million this month in an investment round, according to documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The equity sale boosts the first commercial venture brought to life by Jain’s BlueDot innovation factory.
Jain deferred comment on the details of the investment today, but in an April interview, he said Viome was just the kind of technological moonshot BlueDot was designed to foster.
“Our moonshot here is, can we create a world where chronic illness becomes a matter of choice?” he said at the time.
He told GeekWire that the newly published work on cell conversion complements different approaches that rely on cell transplants.
“I hope that one or the other approach starts to deliver results to patients in the near term,” he said. “We’re working really hard every day to make this work for people.”
University of Washington geneticist Jay Shendure will direct one of the newly created Allen Discovery Centers. (Allen Institute Photo)
The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to speed the pace of biomedical breakthroughs, is adding two more research centers to its lineup – including one at the University of Washington.
Each of the Allen Discovery Centers will receive $10 million in grants over the next four years, with the potential for a total $30 million boost over eight years.
The “kidney on a chip” is about the size of a credit card. (UW Photo / Alex Levine)
A stack of card-sized gizmos that test the effects of drugs, toxins and weightlessness on human kidney cells is due to take a ride to the International Space Station as early as next year – and researchers at the University of Washington can’t wait.
“The opportunity to study how physical cues emanating from loss of gravitational forces affect kidney cellular function has the potential to improve the health of people living on Earth, as well as prevent medical complications that astronauts experience from weightlessness,” he added.
Three Allen Distinguished Investigator projects focus on epigenetics, or how genes are turned on and off. Researchers will study how the 3-D shape of the genome and the presence of regulatory molecules impact the behavior of cells.(Molekuul.be via Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group)
Epigenetics, aging and microbial evolution: Those are the latest words in biomedical research for the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, backed up with $7.5 million in awards for five teams of scientists.
Each of the teams will receive $1.5 million over the next three years to boost early-stage studies that have the potential to yield medical breakthroughs.
“It’s part of Paul Allen’s growing commitment to the idea that this is the century of bioscience,” Tom Skalak, executive director of the Seattle-based Frontiers Group, told GeekWire. Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, launched the Frontiers Group last year with a $100 million commitment.
Scanning fiber angioscopic images with red reflectance for structural images (left) and blue fluorescence for label-free biochemical contrast (right). The images reveal multiple atherosclerotic lesions with very low fluorescence in the blue spectrum in comparison to the surrounding healthy artery. (University of Michigan Medicine Photos)
Researchers have found a way to use a laser-scanning mini-camera to map the inner working of blood vessels and spot the early signs of stroke risk.
The proof-of-concept demonstrations, conducted using carotid arteries that were harvested during autopsies, are described today in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The technique takes advantage of an instrument known as a scanning fiber endoscope, or SFE, which was invented by Eric Seibel, a mechanical engineering research professor at the University of Washington.
Seibel designed the endoscope to be used in early cancer detection, but medical researchers at the University of Michigan repurposed the device to look for signs of atherosclerosis inside the harvested arteries. The researchers also conducted experiments using live rabbits.
Geneticist Michael Snyder was wearing seven biosensors collecting data about his health when he noticed changes in his heart rate and oxygen level during a flight. (Stanford Photo / Steve Fisch)
Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder’s research into wearable biosensors has turned into a case study demonstrating the promise of predictive medicine – with Snyder as the star subject.
Snyder had himself and 59 other people hooked up with an array of up to seven biosensors that are designed to monitor heart rate, skin temperature, oxygen uptake, body activity and other health metrics.
The continuous sensor readings were supplemented by periodic lab tests, focusing on factors ranging from blood chemistry to gene expression. It’s similar to the personalized approach to wellness that’s being pioneered by Seattle-based Arivale.
The study, published today in PLOS Biology, shows that it’s possible to associate deviations from a health baseline with environmental conditions, illnesses or other factors that affect a person’s health. Once those deviations are distilled into algorithms, wearable sensors could provide an early warning about conditions ranging from common infections to the early signs of diabetes.
