Novartis announced that its eye care division Alcon has entered into an agreement with a division of Google Inc. to in-license its ‘smart lens’ technology for all ocular medical uses. The agreement with Google[x], a team within Google that is devoted to finding new solutions to big global problems, provides Alcon with the opportunity to develop and commercialize Google’s ‘smart lens’ technology with the potential to transform eye care and further enhance Alcon’s pipeline and global leadership in contact lenses and intraocular lenses. The transaction remains subject to anti-trust approvals.

The agreement between Google and Alcon represents an important step for Novartis, across all of its divisions, to leverage technology to manage human diseases and conditions. Google’s key advances in the miniaturization of electronics complement Novartis’s deep pharmaceuticals and medical device expertise. Novartis aims to enhance the ways in which diseases are mapped within the body and ultimately prevented.

‘We are looking forward to working with Google to bring together their advanced technology and our extensive knowledge of biology to meet unmet medical needs,’ said Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez. ‘This is a key step for us to go beyond the confines of traditional disease management, starting with the eye.’

‘Our dream is to use the latest technology in the miniaturization of electronics to help improve the quality of life for millions of people,’ said Sergey Brin, Co-Founder, Google. ‘We are very excited to work with Novartis to make this dream come true.’

Under the agreement, Google[x] and Alcon will collaborate to develop a ‘smart lens’ that has the potential to address ocular conditions. The smart lens technology involves non-invasive sensors, microchips and other miniaturized electronics which are embedded within contact lenses. Novartis’ interest in this technology is currently focused in two areas:

Helping diabetic patients manage their disease by providing a continuous, minimally invasive measurement of the body’s glucose levels via a ‘smart contact lens’ which is designed to measure tear fluid in the eye and connects wirelessly with a mobile device;
For people living with presbyopia who can no longer read without glasses, the ‘smart lens’ has the potential to provide accommodative vision correction to help restore the eye’s natural autofocus on near objects in the form of an accommodative contact lens or intraocular lens as part of the refractive cataract treatment.
The agreement marries Google’s expertise in miniaturized electronics, low power chip design and micro-fabrication with Alcon’s expertise in physiology and visual performance of the eye, clinical development and evaluation, as well as commercialization of contact and intraocular lenses. Through the collaboration, Alcon seeks to accelerate product innovation based on Google’s ‘smart lens’ technology.

‘Alcon and Google have a deep and common passion for innovation,’ said Jeff George, Division Head of Alcon. ‘By combining Alcon’s leadership in eye care and expertise in contact lenses and intraocular lenses with Google’s innovative ‘smart lens’ technology and groundbreaking speed in research, we aim to unlock a new frontier to jointly address the unmet medical needs of millions of eye care patients around the world.’ Novartis

A Penn Medicine team has found that targeted automated alerts in electronic health records significantly reduce urinary tract infections in hospital patients with urinary catheters. In addition, when the design of the alert was simplified, the rate of improvement dramatically increased.

The alerts help physicians decide whether their patients need urinary catheters in the first place and then alert them to reassess the need for catheters that have not been removed within a recommended time period. The electronic alert was developed by medical researchers and technology experts at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Approximately 75 percent of urinary tract infections acquired in the hospital are associated with a urinary catheter, which is a tube inserted into the bladder through the urethra to drain urine.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15 to 25 percent of hospitalized patients receive urinary catheters during their hospital stay. As many as 70 percent of urinary tract infections in these patients may be preventable using infection control measures such as removing no longer needed catheters resulting in up to 380,000 fewer infections and 9,000 fewer deaths each year.

Hospital visitors and staff are greeted with hand sanitizer dispensers in the lobby, by the elevators and outside rooms as reminders to wash their hands to stop infections, but just how clean are patients’ hands?

A study led by McMaster University researcher Dr. Jocelyn Srigley has found that hospitalized patients wash their hands infrequently. They wash about 30 per cent of the time while in the washroom, 40 per cent during meal times, and only three per cent of the time when using the kitchens on their units. Hand hygiene rates were also low on entering and leaving their hospital room, at about three per cent and seven per cent respectively.

‘This is important because getting patients to wash their hands more could potentially reduce their risk of picking up infections in the hospital,’ said principal investigator Srigley, an assistant professor of medicine at McMaster’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and the associate medical director for infection prevention and control at Hamilton Health Sciences.

Much is known about the importance of health care worker hand hygiene in preventing infections in hospital, but there has been little emphasis on the hand hygiene behaviour of patients as a way to reduce the spread of infection.

Srigley and her team looked at the hand hygiene of 279 adult patients in three multi-organ transplant units of a Canadian acute care teaching hospital over an eight-month period. The researchers used new electronic hand hygiene monitoring technology involving sensors on all soap and sanitizer dispensers, to assess this behaviour. The same system was used by the team in its recent study that discovered fewer health care workers wash their hands when not being watched.

Organisms such as Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) or norovirus can survive on skin and surfaces, contaminate patients’ hands, and then be ingested, leading to infection. Similarly, MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and respiratory viruses could also be acquired by patients from the environment by way of their hands, the authors noted.

Srigley said that with the current lack of focus on patient hand hygiene, this study’s results are not surprising. Furthermore, it is already known that health care worker hand hygiene is far from ideal despite intensive efforts to improve it through education, promotional materials and feedback.

‘At the hospital where this study was conducted, patients were not given any specific information about hand hygiene,’ said Srigley.

‘We can’t expect patients to know when to wash their hands if we don’t inform them, so it’s not surprising that they wash their hands infrequently. In particular for washing hands when entering and exiting their room, it’s not something that I would expect patients to think of doing unless they were educated and reminded to do that.’ EurekAlert

Implementation of an algorithm aimed to diagnose paediatric patients with suspected appendicitis reduces the utilization of computed tomography (CT) scans, without affecting diagnostic accuracy, Mayo Clinic Children’s Center researchers have found.

Acute appendicitis is the most common cause of acute abdominal pain in children. Appendicitis occurs when the appendix becomes inflamed and filled with pus. CT scans are often used to diagnose acute appendicitis because they are accurate, widely available and have the ability to provide clinicians with advanced information in appendicitis cases suspected of complications.

However, CT scans are expensive and expose patients to ionizing radiation.

A significant breakthrough could revolutionise surgical practice and regenerative medicine. A team led by Ludwik Leibler from the Laboratoire Mati