Build a Liver (06.24.04) - People with liver disease often have to wait years for a transplant. While they wait, five of them die of liver failure every day. But now, one nanotechnologist has built a liver on a chip.
Super Screener (11.13.03) - One nanotechnologist wants to detect bioterror agents much more quickly, so she's made a tiny sensor that works like our own cells.
They can send a man to the moon— so why can't they come up with prenatal tests that don't risk harming babies? In fact, as this ScienCentral News video reports, a new technology being developed to help astronauts get to Mars may launch safer tests for expectant mothers.
Prenatal Nanotechnology
Lisa Anderson had a difficult pregnancy. From the start, she was worried about her baby's health. "I had complications starting really early on in the pregnancy," she says. "I had a lot of problems. It was stressful from the beginning."
At 26 weeks, after a prenatal test, Anderson's obstetrician ordered her to bed, where she remained for the next ten weeks. Even so, Anderson had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance when her daughter Vivian arrived four weeks early. Anderson was only able to hold her newborn baby while feeding her: doctors had to place Vivian in an incubator twice, right after she was born and again after her parents had taken her home, because her blood's high bilirubin content caused jaundice.
Luckily, Vivian is now a healthy, happy 14-month-old. "It still boggles my mind," says Anderson, when she hears about other women's problem-free experiences with pregnancy and birth.
Expectant mothers like Anderson might worry less if prenatal tests were risk free. Now, a NASA project promises to offer that safer alternative.
"We're moving toward a technology that would allow us to do prenatal diagnostics without the invasive studies that we do now— putting a needle into the woman, taking some cells through the cervix from the early placenta," explains Edward McCabe, pediatrician and geneticist who is physician-in-chief at Mattel Children's Hospital at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Both of those procedures are extremely invasive and there's a small but real risk that the pregnancy can be lost because of labor being induced by the tests."
For two years, McCabe has been collaborating with engineers at UCLA though the NASA funded Cell Mimetic Institute for Space Exploration (CMISE). The purpose of CMISE collaborations between engineers and biomedical researchers like McCabe is to develop technology to monitor astronauts' health during long trips into outer space. A round trip to Mars, for example, would take at least three years, during which space travelers would be exposed to radiation. McCabe's team is working on a "lab on a chip" that could measure astronauts' radiation exposure from a blood sample— much more accurately than a Geiger counter or a film badge does now.
McCabe's research team is learning how to put individual cells in each well on this silicon chip.
Working with electrical engineer Ming Wu and mechanical and aerospace engineer C.J. Kim, McCabe's team has used some of the same technology involved in manufacturing computer chips to make a silicon oxide chip with tiny wells. Now they are working on various techniques for moving cells, one by one, into those wells, where they can be analyzed quickly and simply. "We're learning how to move the cells around without doing harm to the cells," McCabe says, "so that we can sort the cells, and identify the cells of interest to us. Once we can take a single cell and move it into a well, those wells will be monitored chemically and that will allow us to know whether that individual cell has suffered radiation damage" during space travel.
McCabe says that because fetal cells circulate in an expectant mother's blood, his team's approach also could diagnose prenatal problems quickly and safely from a simple blood test. "We could sort the mother's blood on the chip, identify the fetal cells, and then test them for Down syndrome, for other chromosomal abnormalities, for a genetic disease that might run in the family," he explains. "And we would know whether or not the fetus was at risk without risking the continuation of that pregnancy."
This portable lab-on-a-chip, which could also diagnose parasitic and bacterial infections and even cancer, could be available within five years. "It will allow us to move away from the laboratory," McCabe says. "We don't require a laboratory full of equipment. We have a laboratory in a shoe box." He's particularly eager to see the lab on a chip at work in developing countries, to diagnose and combat plagues like malaria.
McCabe says this kind of teamwork across scientific disciplines is fun for all involved. Since he began his career as a high school sophomore, working in a pediatric research lab thanks to a Sputnik-inspired program, he's especially thrilled to be working on a NASA project. "I'm like a kid in a candy shop," he exclaims. "The engineers have these devices and these ideas. They want to apply them to biological problems. We have ideas about the biology and the medicine, and we don't know how to implement those ideas and bring them to reality. And so together as a team, we're able to put our ideas together and do some really cool stuff." Like taking some of the anxiety out of waiting for a baby.
delicious
digg
magnolia
reddit
newsvine
netscape
netvibes
