George Whitesides has developed a prototype for paper "chip" technology that could be used in the developing world to cheaply diagnose deadly diseases such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis and gastroenteritis. The first products will be available in about a year, he said. His efforts, which find their inspiration from the simple designs of comic books and computer chips, are surprisingly low-tech and cheap. Patients put a drop of blood on one side of the slip of paper, and on the other appears a colorful pattern in the shape of a tree, which tells medical professionals whether the person is infected with certain diseases. Water-repellent comic-book ink saturates several layers of paper, he said. The ink funnels a patient's blood into tree-like channels, where several layers of treated paper react with the blood to create diagnostic colors. It's not entirely unlike a home pregnancy test, Whitesides said, but the chips are much smaller and cheaper, and they test for multiple diseases at once. They also show how severely a person is infected rather than producing only a positive-negative reading.
anonymous on 07 Feb 15Stem cell research has now proved that stem cells exist in the mind and the heart. Researchers in numerous labs are attempting to discover better approaches to make substantial amounts of adult stemcells and to control them to produce particular cell sorts so that, they can be utilized to treat damage or malady.
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