Category: Science

The ENCODE project changes our understanding of how DNA works

On By A.P.In DNA, Nature, Science1 Comment

 

When the human genome was sequenced a decade ago, scientists hailed the feat as a technical tour de force — but they also knew it was just a start. The “HHA000078” DNA blueprint was finally laid bare, but no one knew what it all meant.

Now an international team has taken the crucial next step by delivering the first in-depth report on what the endless loops and lengths of DNA inside our cells are up to.

The findings, detailed Wednesday in more than two dozen reports in the journals Nature and Science and other publications, do much more than provide a straightforward list of genes. By creating a complicated catalog of all the places along our DNA strands that are biochemically active, they offer new insight into how genes work and influence common diseases. They also upend the conventional wisdom that most of our DNA serves no useful purpose.

Defining this hive of activity is essential, scientists said, because it transforms our picture of the human blueprint from a static list of 3 billion DNA building blocks into the dynamic master-regulator that it is. The revelations will be key to understanding how genes are controlled so that they leap into action at precisely the right time and place in our bodies, allowing a whole human being to develop from a single fertilized egg. In addition, they will help explain how the carefully choreographed process can go awry, triggering birth defects, diseases and aging.

“The human genome was a bit like getting ‘War and Peace’ in Russian: It’s a great book containing all of human experience, but [if] I don’t know any Russian it’s very hard to read,” said Ewan Birney, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in England who coordinated the analysis for the project. Now scientists are on their way to having the translation, he said.

More than 400 scientists have conducted upward of 1,600 experiments over five years to produce the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, which goes by the nickname ENCODE. If graphically presented, the data it has generated so far would cover a poster 30 kilometers long and 16 meters high, Birney estimated.

Already, it is revealing surprises.

The results overturn old ideas that the bulk of DNA in our cells is useless — albeit inoffensive — junk just carried along for the evolutionary ride. Back in 2003, when the human genome was finished, scientists estimated that less than 2% carries instructions for making proteins, which become physical structures in our bodies and do the myriad jobs inside cells. The conventional wisdom was that the rest of the genetic code didn’t do very much.

But the new analysis shows that more than 80% of the human genome is active in at least one biological process that the ENCODE team measured. Nearly all of it could turn out to be active when the data are more complete.

A huge chunk of that activity is wrapped up with gene regulation — dictating whether the instructions each gene carries for making a unique protein will be executed or not. Such regulation is key, because pretty much every cell in the human body carries the entire set of 21,000 protein-making genes. To adopt its unique identity, each cell — be it one in the pancreas that makes insulin or one in the skin making pigment or hair — must activate only a subset of them.

Using an array of laboratory methods and tissue from more than 150 types of human cells, the scientists found and mapped millions of DNA sites that act as “switches” — turning genes off or on in one cell or another, at various times and intensities. The switches flip when master-regulator proteins bind to them, or when chemical “tags” are attached to them by enzymes.

“There’s way more switches than we ever imagined,” Birney said.

Some of the switches are right where scientists would expect them to be: close to the genes they control. But some are extremely far away, the researchers found.

Though that was unexpected, it makes sense, said molecular geneticist Joseph Ecker of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, who was not on the ENCODE team but wrote a commentary accompanying the main report in Nature.

“We draw DNA out as this long, linear thing where you can read from one end to the other, but the reality in the cell is that the molecule is folded tightly and compactly,” Ecker said. With the DNA scrunched up like a hairball, places far apart on a strand can end up close to each other in physical space.

The mass of data from the project is already proving a boon for scientists exploring the genetics of common disorders such as cancer and diabetes, which up till now has been a largely frustrating effort.

“Now that we have the switches, we can start to understand why a combination of DNA variants might increase the chances of a particular disease,” said ENCODE researcher Dr. Bradley Bernstein, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Past efforts had focused on screening the genomes of people with various diseases to look for patterns of DNA differences, said Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, a genome scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle and member of the ENCODE team. Researchers found hundreds or thousands of variants associated with common diseases, but only about 5% of them were in genes, and it was unclear what all the other ones did.

Many of these variants, it now turns out, were located in places involved in regulating genes. For instance, the team discovered that one variant associated with platelet count was within a stretch of DNA that controls a gene involved in platelet production.

“It isn’t just noise,” Stamatoyannopoulos said of the baffling results from earlier studies.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-dna-encode-20120906,0,7798745.story

Birds hold funerals for the dead

On By A.P.In Animal Behaviour, Bird funeral, Birds, California, dead bird, funeral, Nature, Science, scolds, scrub jay, Teresa Iglesias, UC Davis, University of California, Western scrub jay, zeep-scolds, zeepsLeave a comment

 

When western scrub jays encounter a dead bird, they call out to one another and stop foraging.

The jays then often fly down to the dead body and gather around it, scientists have discovered.

The behaviour may have evolved to warn other birds of nearby danger, report researchers in California, who have published the findings in the journal Animal Behaviour.

The revelation comes from a study by Teresa Iglesias and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, US.

They conducted experiments, placing a series of objects into residential back yards and observing how western scrub jays in the area reacted.

The objects included different coloured pieces of wood, dead jays, as well as mounted, stuffed jays and great horned owls, simulating the presence of live jays and predators.

The jays reacted indifferently to the wooden objects.

But when they spied a dead bird, they started making alarm calls, warning others long distances away.

The jays then gathered around the dead body, forming large cacophonous aggregations. The calls they made, known as “zeeps”, “scolds” and “zeep-scolds”, encouraged new jays to attend to the dead.

The jays also stopped foraging for food, a change in behaviour that lasted for over a day.

When the birds were fooled into thinking a predator had arrived, by being exposed to a mounted owl, they also gathered together and made a series of alarm calls.

They also swooped down at the supposed predator, to scare it off. But the jays never swooped at the body of a dead bird.

The birds also occasionally mobbed the stuffed jays; a behaviour they are known to do in the wild when they attack competitors or sick birds.

The fact that the jays didn’t react to the wooden objects shows that it is not the novelty of a dead bird appearing that triggers the reaction.

The results show that “without witnessing the struggle and manner of death”, the researchers write, the jays see the presence of a dead bird as information to be publicly shared, just as they do the presence of a predator.

Spreading the message that a dead bird is in the area helps safeguard other birds, alerting them to danger, and lowering their risk from whatever killed the original bird in the first place, the researchers say.

Other animals are known to take notice of their dead.

Giraffes and elephants, for example, have been recorded loitering around the body of a recently deceased close relative, raising the idea that animals have a mental concept of death, and may even mourn those that have passed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19421217

‘Smart Carpet’ detects falls and unfamiliar footsteps

On By A.P.In carpet, footstep detection, Inventions, optical fiber, Patricia Scully, safety, Science, smart carpet, Survival, Technology, The Future, United Kingdom, University of ManchesterLeave a comment

A team at the University of Manchester in the UK has developed a carpet that can detect when someone has fallen over or when unfamiliar feet walk across it.

Optical fibres in the carpet’s underlay create a 2D pressure map that distorts when stepped on. Sensors around the carpet’s edges then relay signals to a computer which is used to analyse the footstep patterns. When a change is detected – such as a sudden stumble and fall – an alarm can be set to sound.

By monitoring footsteps over time, the system can also learn people’s walking patterns and watch out for subtle changes, such as a gradual favouring of one leg over the other. It could then be used to predict the onset of mobility problems in the elderly, for example.

The carpet could also be used as an intruder alert, says team member Patricia Scully. “In theory, we could identify footsteps of individuals and the shoes they are wearing,” she says.

But it needn’t all be about feet. The system is designed to be versatile, meaning that different sensors could instead be used to provide early warning of chemical spillages or fire.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/09/smart-carpet-detects-falls—a.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Machine invented that recycles patient’s blood during surgery

On By A.P.In Advancis, autotransfusion, blood, blood loss, blood recycling, blood transfusion, Canada, Glasgow, Hemosep, Inventions, Strathclyde University, surgery, Terry Gourlay, TurkeyLeave a comment

The bigger the operation, the more blood gets spilled. In procedures like open heart surgery and major trauma, blood loss can be so great that large quantities need to be replaced.

Blood transfusions are often the preferred option. But in a minority of cases there can be adverse reactions.

And then there is the cost. As Professor Terry Gourlay puts it: “Blood is not cheap”.

End Quote Professor Terry Gourlay Strathclyde University

He is a bioengineer at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, the leader of a team which has produced a new device to recycle blood during major surgery.

Recovering a surgical patient’s blood and putting it back in the body is not a new idea. But autotransfusion, as it is known, is typically a skilled, time-consuming and costly business.

Hemosep, as the Strathclyde process is known, is altogether more straightforward and looks a lot less labour intensive.

There is a small, lightweight machine which agitates the blood to stop it settling. But the key to it is the special plastic bag in which the recovered blood is poured.

Simply put, it is like a chemical sponge that soaks up the unwanted plasma which has diluted the blood during the operation.

The key component is an advanced polycarbonate membrane which lets the plasma through but keeps the important blood components separate. They include important proteins and clotting factors.

These concentrated cells can then be returned to the patient.

According to Professor Gourlay, the medical benefit of that is straightforward: “It’s your blood.”

Hemosep has already been tested successfully in Turkey where it has been used in more than 100 open heart surgery procedures.

The system will now be sold throughout the European Union in a partnership between Strathclyde and the medical device company, Advancis. It has also been approved for sale in Canada.

Professor Gourlay says that in some markets the true cost of a unit of blood can touch $1,600 and blood products constitute a multi-billion dollar worldwide market.

He explained: “Blood is not free, by any measure, and in fact in North America the latest studies suggest that a unit of blood costs upwards of $1,600.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-19324077

DNA is the future of data storage

On By A.P.In data storage, DNA, George Church, Harvard, Harvard Wyss Institute, Inventions, Origins of Life, Science, Sri Kosuri, TechnologyLeave a comment

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.

Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, it might just be possible to record everything.

http://refreshingnews99.blogspot.in/2012/08/harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700.html

Thanks to kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Pupil dilation in response to viewing erotic videos indicates sexual orientation

On By A.P.In bisexuality, Cornell University, erotic video, heterosexuality, homosexuality, Human Behavior, New York City, pupil dilation, pupillary reponse, Science, sexual orientation, sexuality, The Brain, Weill Medical CollegeLeave a comment

For the first time, researchers have used a specialized camera to measure pupillary changes in people watching erotic videos, the changes in pupil dilation revealing where the participant is located on the heterosexual-homosexual spectrum. The researchers at Cornell University who developed the technique say it provides an accurate method of gauging the precise sexual orientation of a subject. The work is detailed in the journal PLoS ONE.

Previously, researchers trying to assess sexual orientation simply asked people about their sexuality or used intrusive physiological measures, such as assessing their genital arousal.

“We wanted to find an alternative measure that would be an automatic indication of sexual orientation, but without being as invasive as previous measures. Pupillary responses are exactly that,” says lead researcher Gerulf Rieger. “With this new technology we are able to explore sexual orientation of people who would never participate in a study on genital arousal, such as people from traditional cultures. This will give us a much better understanding how sexuality is expressed across the planet.”

Experimenting with the technique, the researchers found heterosexual men showed strong pupillary responses to sexual videos of women, and little to men. Heterosexual women, however, showed pupillary responses to both sexes. This result confirms previous research suggesting that women have a very different type of sexuality than men.

Interestingly, the new study sheds new light on the long-standing debate on male bisexuality. Previous notions were that most bisexual men do not base their sexual identity on their physiological sexual arousal but on romantic and identity issues. Contrary to this claim, bisexual men in the new study showed substantial pupil dilations to sexual videos of both men and women.

“We can now finally argue that a flexible sexual desire is not simply restricted to women – some men have it, too, and it is reflected in their pupils,” said co-researcher Ritch C. Savin-Williams. “In fact, not even a division into ‘straight,’ ‘bi,’ and ‘gay’ tells the full story. Men who identity as ‘mostly straight’ really exist both in their identity and their pupil response; they are more aroused to males than straight men, but much less so than both bisexual and gay men.”

Thanks to Dr. A.R. for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Disney Is ‘Face Cloning’ People to Create Terrifyingly Realistic Robots

On By A.P.In Disney, face cloning, Inventions, Science, Technology, ZurichLeave a comment

The Hall of Presidents is about to get a whole lot creepier, at least if Disney’s researchers get their way. That’s because they’re “face cloning” people at a lab in Zurich in order to create the most realistic animatronic characters ever made.

First of all, yes, Disney has a laboratory in Zurich. It’s one of six around the world where the company researches things like computer graphics, 3D technology and, I can only assume, how to most efficiently suck money out of your pocket when you visit Disneyworld.

What does “physical face cloning” involve? Researchers used video cameras to capture several expressions on a subject’s face, recreating them in 3D computer models down to individual wrinkles and facial hair. They then experimented with different thicknesses of silicon for each part of the face until they could create a mold for the perfect synthetic skin.

They slapped that silicone skin on a 3D-printed model of the subject’s head to create their very own replicant. As the authors of the study point out (PDF), it’s not all that different from creating a 3D model for a Pixar movie, except that in real life you have to worry about things like materials and the motors that make the face change expressions.

The plan is to develop a “complete process for automating the physical reproduction of a human face on an animatronics device,” meaning all you’ll have to do in the future is record a person’s face and the computer will do the rest. This is a different process than the one used to make the famous Geminoid robots from Osaka University, whose skin is individually crafted by artists through trial and error.

The next step is developing more advanced actuators and multi-layered synthetic skin to give the researchers more degrees of freedom in mimicking facial expressions. That means next time you go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, don’t be surprised to see a terrifyingly realistic Johnny Depp-bot cavorting with an appropriately dead-eyed Orlando Bloom.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/08/15/disney-is-face-cloning-people-to-create-terrifyingly-realistic-robots/?iid=tl-article-latest#ixzz23fBwVu61

Retinal device restores sight to blind mice

On By A.P.In Alfred Sommer, Blindness, Chethan Pandarinath, Cornell University, Cornell University Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Inventions, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, macular degeneration, Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Neuroscience, New York City, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retina, retina device, retinal prosthesis, Science, Sheila Nirenberg, Technology, The Brain, The Future, The Singularity, Weill Medical CollegeLeave a comment

 

Researchers report they have developed in mice what they believe might one day become a breakthrough for humans: a retinal prosthesis that could restore near-normal sight to those who have lost their vision.

That would be a welcome development for the roughly 25 million people worldwide who are blind because of retinal disease, most notably macular degeneration.

The notion of using prosthetics to combat blindness is not new, with prior efforts involving retinal electrode implantation and/or gene therapy restoring a limited ability to pick out spots and rough edges of light.

The current effort takes matters to a new level. The scientists fashioned a prosthetic system packed with computer chips that replicate the “neural impulse codes” the eye uses to transmit light signals to the brain.

“This is a unique approach that hasn’t really been explored before, and we’re really very excited about it,” said study author Sheila Nirenberg, a professor and computational neuroscientist in the department of physiology and biophysics at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City. “I’ve actually been working on this for 10 years. And suddenly, after a lot of work, I knew immediately that I could make a prosthetic that would work, by making one that could take in images and process them into a code that the brain can understand.”

Nirenberg and her co-author Chethan Pandarinath (a former Cornell graduate student now conducting postdoctoral research at Stanford University School of Medicine) report their work in the Aug. 14 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their efforts were funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Cornell University’s Institute for Computational Biomedicine.

The study authors explained that retinal diseases destroy the light-catching photoreceptor cells on the retina’s surface. Without those, the eye cannot convert light into neural signals that can be sent to the brain.

However, most of these patients retain the use of their retina’s “output cells” — called ganglion cells — whose job it is to actually send these impulses to the brain. The goal, therefore, would be to jumpstart these ganglion cells by using a light-catching device that could produce critical neural signaling.

But past efforts to implant electrodes directly into the eye have only achieved a small degree of ganglion stimulation, and alternate strategies using gene therapy to insert light-sensitive proteins directly into the retina have also fallen short, the researchers said.

Nirenberg theorized that stimulation alone wasn’t enough if the neural signals weren’t exact replicas of those the brain receives from a healthy retina.

“So, what we did is figure out this code, the right set of mathematical equations,” Nirenberg explained. And by incorporating the code right into their prosthetic device’s chip, she and Pandarinath generated the kind of electrical and light impulses that the brain understood.

The team also used gene therapy to hypersensitize the ganglion output cells and get them to deliver the visual message up the chain of command.

Behavioral tests were then conducted among blind mice given a code-outfitted retinal prosthetic and among those given a prosthetic that lacked the code in question.

The result: The code group fared dramatically better on visual tracking than the non-code group, with the former able to distinguish images nearly as well as mice with healthy retinas.

“Now we hope to move on to human trials as soon as possible,” said Nirenberg. “Of course, we have to conduct standard safety studies before we get there. And I would say that we’re looking at five to seven years before this is something that might be ready to go, in the best possible case. But we do hope to start clinical trials in the next one to two years.”

Results achieved in animal studies don’t necessarily translate to humans.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, a professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and dean emeritus of Hopkins’  Bloomberg School of Public Health, urged caution about the findings.

“This could be revolutionary,” he said. “But I doubt it. It’s a very, very complicated business. And people have been working on it intensively and incrementally for the last 30 years.”

“The fact that they have done something that sounds a little bit better than the last set of results is great,” Sommer added.  “It’s terrific. But this approach is really in its infancy. And I guarantee that it will be a long time before they get to the point where they can really restore vision to people using prosthetics.”

Other advances may offer benefits in the meantime, he said. “We now have new therapies that we didn’t have even five years ago,” Sommer said. “So we may be reaching a state where the amount of people losing their sight will decline even as these new techniques for providing artificial vision improve. It may not be as sci-fi. But I think it’s infinitely more important at this stage.”

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/08/13/retinal-device-restores-sight-to-blind-mice

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Berkeley Laser Fires Pulses Hundreds of Times More Powerful Than All the World’s Electric Plants Combined

On By A.P.In BELLA, Berkeley, Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator, Department of Energy, femtosecond, Inventions, laser, laser wakefield acceleration, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, petawatt, Science, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Wim LeemansLeave a comment

Blink and you’ll miss it. Don’t blink, and you’ll still miss it.

Imagine a device capable of delivering more power than all of the world’s electric plants. But this is not a prop for the next James Bond movie. A new laser at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was put through its paces July 20, delivering pulses with a petawatt of power once per second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts—about 400 times as much as the combined instantaneous output of all the world’s electric plants.

How is that even possible? Well, the pulses at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) are both exceedingly powerful and exceedingly short. Each petawatt burst lasts just 40 femtoseconds, or 0.00000000000004 second. Since it fires just one brief pulse per second, the laser’s average power is only about 40 watts—the same as an incandescent bulb in a reading lamp.

BELLA’s laser is not the first to pack so much power—a laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just an hour’s drive inland from Berkeley, reached 1.25 petawatts in the 1990s. And the University of Texas at Austin has its own high-power laser, which hit the 1.1-petawatt mark in 2008. But the Berkeley laser is the first to deliver petawatt pulses with such frequency, the lab says. At full power, for comparison, the Texas Petawatt Laser can fire one shot per hour.

The Department of Energy plans to use the powerful laser to drive a very compact particle accelerator via a process called laser wakefield acceleration, boosting electrons to high energies for use in colliders or for imaging or medical applications. Electron beams are already in use to produce bright pulses of x-rays for high-speed imaging. An intense laser pulse can ionize the atoms in a gas, separating electrons from protons to produce a plasma. And laser-carved waves in the plasma [blue in image above] sweep up electrons [green], accelerating them outward at nearly the speed of light.

BELLA director Wim Leemans says that the project’s first experiments will seek to accelerate beams of electrons to energies of 10 billion electron-volts (or 10 GeV) by firing the laser through a plasma-based apparatus about one meter long. The laser apparatus itself is quite a bit larger, filling a good-size room. For comparison, the recently repurposed Stanford Linear Accelerator Center produced electron beams of 50 GeV from an accelerator 3.2 kilometers in length.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/08/01/berkeley-laser-fires-pulses-hundreds-of-times-more-powerful-than-all-the-worlds-electric-plants-combined/

Thanks to Ray Gaudette for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Digital pills enter the marketplace

On By A.P.In California, Digital medicine, digital pill, Eric Topol, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, George Savage, Inventions, La Jolla, Proteus Digital Health, Redwood City, Science, Scripps Translational Science Institute, The Future, The SingularityLeave a comment

 

Digestible microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking their medications as prescribed. These sensors are the first ingestible devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To some, they signify the beginning of an era in digital medicine.

“About half of all people don’t take medications like they’re supposed to,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla,California. “This device could be a solution to that problem, so that doctors can know when to rev up a patient’s medication adherence.” Topol is not affiliated with the company that manufactures the device, Proteus Digital Health in Redwood City,California, but he embraces the sensor’s futuristic appeal, saying, “It’s like big brother watching you take your medicine.”

The sand-particle sized sensor consists of a minute silicon chip containing trace amounts of magnesium and copper. When swallowed, it generates a slight voltage in response to digestive juices, which conveys a signal to the surface of a person’s skin where a patch then relays the information to a mobile phone belonging to a healthcare-provider.

Currently, the FDA, and the analogous regulatory agency in Europe have only approved the device based on studies showing its safety and efficacy when implanted in placebo pills. But Proteus hopes to have the device approved within other drugs in the near future. Medicines that must be taken for years, such as those for drug resistant tuberculosis, diabetes, and for the elderly with chronic diseases, are top candidates, says George Savage, co-founder and chief medical officer at the company.

“The point is not for doctors to castigate people, but to understand how people are responding to their treatments,” Savage says. “This way doctors can prescribe a different dose or a different medicine if they learn that it’s not being taken appropriately.”

Proponents of digital medical devices predict that they will provide alternatives to doctor visits, blood tests, MRIs and CAT scans. Other gadgets in the pipeline include implantable devices that wirelessly inject drugs at pre-specified times, and sensors that deliver a person’s electrocardiogram to their smartphone.

In his book published in January, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Topol says that the 2010s will be known as the era of digital medical devices. “There are so many of these new technologies coming along,” Topol says, “it’s going to be a new frontier for rendering care.”

Thanks to Kedmobee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/digital-pills-make-their-way-to-market.html