Top TechTop Tech #92: Printing bones, Healing heat, delivering drugs
Important innovations in science and technology, every day
By Paul Worthington
Wednesday’s Top Tech:
• Implantable microchips deliver drugs
• Printing bones
• Healing with heat
Implantable microchips deliver drugs
A spinoff from MIT develops implantable microchip-based devices that release drugs inside the body over a period of years.
Microchips Biotech has partnered with generic drugs producer Teva Pharmaceutical to commercialize the wirelessly controlled device, reports Kurzweil AI. It “can be programmed wirelessly to release individual doses for up to 16 years to treat, for example, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and osteoporosis.”
Printing bones
Hey, it’s another new use of additive manufacturing (3D printing) — making artificial infrastructure and filler material for repairing bones.
Scientists at the University of Nottingham says their method uses bioprinting to produce constructs from a thermoresponsive microparticulate material based on poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) at ambient conditions — constructs that could be engineered with yield stresses within the range of properties of human cancellous bone (the spongy tissue at the end of long bones). The doughy biomaterial could be injected to fill large bone fractures, and incorporate protein-releasing microspheres.
Healing with heat
A heating pad can bring relief for aching muscles — and now a elastic mesh material can provide improved thermotherapy.
The flexible, silver-impregnated material lets you more effectively “wrap heat” around a joint than you could with a standard plug-in pad.
Developed by scientists at Korea’s Center for Nanoparticle Research, the new design is simpler to make than previous attempts and requires no exotic materials (like carbon nanotubes and gold) or complex fabrication. Instead it uses silver nanowires mixed into a liquid elastic material that is soft and stretchy when dry.
