Boston Children

You can whack it with a hammer, attack it with a drill, even stab it with a screwdriver. But try as you might, you won’t be able to tamper with a high-tech pill dispenser designed by mechanical engineering students at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering.

Which is exactly the point.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that drug overdoses kill more than 44,000 Americans annually, including more than 16,000 deaths from prescription drugs. Federal officials also say that at least one in 20 Americans ingests drugs prescribed for someone else. Concerned about these alarming statistics, experts at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy challenged a team of Johns Hopkins senior mechanical engineers to design and build an anti-theft and tamper-resistant pill dispenser.

‘We needed this personal pill ‘safe’ to have tamper resistance, personal identification capabilities, and a locking mechanism that allows only a pharmacist to load the device with pills,’ said Kavi Bhalla, assistant professor at the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the team’s mentors for the project.

Classmates Megan Carney, Joseph Hajj, Joseph Heaney, and Welles Sakmar

Physicists from the University of Sydney have devised a way to use diamonds to identify cancerous tumours before they become life threatening.
Their reveal how a nano-scale, synthetic version of the precious gem can light up early-stage cancers in non-toxic, non-invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans.
Targeting cancers with tailored chemicals is not new but scientists struggle to detect where these chemicals go since, short of a biopsy, there are few ways to see if a treatment has been taken-up by a cancer.
Led by Professor David Reilly from the School of Physics, researchers from the University investigated how nanoscale diamonds could help identify cancers in their earliest stages.
‘We knew nano diamonds were of interest for delivering drugs during chemotherapy because they are largely non-toxic and non-reactive,’ says Professor Reilly.
‘We thought we could build on these non-toxic properties realizing that diamonds have magnetic characteristics enabling them to act as beacons in MRIs. We effectively turned a pharmaceutical problem into a physics problem.’
Professor Reilly’s team turned its attention to hyperpolarizing nano-diamonds, a process of aligning atoms inside a diamond so they create a signal detectable by an MRI scanner.
‘By attaching hyperpolarized diamonds to molecules targeting cancers the technique can allow tracking of the molecules’ movement in the body,’ says Ewa Rej, the paper’s lead author.
‘This is a great example of how quantum physics research tackles real-world problems, in this case opening the way for us to image and target cancers long before they become life-threatening,’ says Professor Reilly.
The next stage of the team’s work involves working with medical researchers to test the new technology on animals. Also on the horizon is research using scorpion venom to target brain tumours with MRI scanning.

University of Sydneyhttp://tinyurl.com/h8qj2ah

A clinical trial by University of Colorado Cancer Center investigators and collaborators at Beaumont Health in Michigan and the University of Texas Medical Branch is evaluating a new method for pinpointing and sparing healthy lung tissue during lung cancer radiotherapy. The group is applying advanced image analysis techniques to 4D CT scans already performed as a standard step in targeting lung cancer radiotherapy, to map areas of lung function without additional testing.

Protective mastectomies that preserve the nipple and surrounding skin prevent breast cancer as effectively as more invasive surgeries for women with a genetic mutation called BRCA that raises their risk of developing breast cancer, a multi-institution study led by Mayo Clinic found. The research should reassure patients and surgeons that nipple-sparing mastectomies, which leave women with more natural-looking breasts than other mastectomies, are a safe way to reduce breast cancer risk in BRCA carriers, the authors say..