Archive For The “Diane Israel” Category
By Diane Israel
If you can see a faint or shadowy image, but can’t tell what it is due to visual impairment, now by simply pointing to it, MyEye1 will tell you what it is. It’s like having a seeing-eye dog that can speak to you in English, but it’s much smaller and doesn’t poop! The device wears pretty much like any set of eyeglasses.
Consider my friend Larry as a case-in-point. Twenty years ago, Larry developed Diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy affects blood vessels in the light-sensitive tissue called the retina that lines the back of the eye. It is the most common cause of vision loss among people with diabetes and the leading cause of vision impairment and blindness among working-age adults.
While Larry and I were on a road trip through Northern Arizona last summer, we stopped for a bite to eat and to walk his dogs. While in the parking lot, Larry asked me if the tall, skinny object behind me was a tree or a telephone pole. That’s the extent of his visual capabilities. And there’s no medical procedure that has any promise of restoring his vision to reasonable standards.
Until now.
Artificial Intelligence Meets Artificial Vision: Introducing Orcam’s MyEye!
Now Larry, and those like him, can enrich their daily experiences and enjoy greater independence with OrCam.
Israeli tech is on the rise.
OrCam MyEye 1 is a breakthrough wearable artificial vision device designed to assist people who are blind, visually impaired, or have a reading disability. The intuitive, lightweight smart camera instantly and discreetly reads printed and digital text aloud – from any surface – and recognizes faces, products, and money notes, all in real time.
And now, with the release of MyEye 2.0, the benefits go far beyond MyEye1, including…
- Read from any surface. Real-time identification of faces is seamlessly announced
- Recognize known faces. Intuitively responds to simple hand gestures
- Identify products. Identification of products, enabling an independent shopping experience.
- Easy to use. Intuitively responds to simple hand gestures
About Orcam
OrCam was jointly founded in 2010 by Prof. Amnon Shashua and Mr. Ziv Aviram, who are also the co-founders of Mobileye, the collision avoidance system leader, and autonomous driving innovator. The original OrCam MyEye device was launched in 2015, and the next generation OrCam MyEye 2.0 was launched in 2017.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
This week’s health tech update examines the latest hi-tech stem cell research, and another early detection technique that’s far from hi-tech (per se) but very effective. The question is whether you can get used to having a small camera in your toilet bowl!
From Israel30c.com…
Senecio of Kfar Saba put a twist on an existing mosquito-control method of releasing sterile male mosquitoes in infested areas by using airplanes rather than vans, greatly increasing the coverage perimeters.
“Releasing millions of sterile male mosquitoes from airplanes traveling at 250 kilometers per hour, in what I call Operation Infinite Romeo, presents monumental challenges,” writes Wanetick.
Among these challenges are sourcing the fragile insects, packaging them in containers, estimating the number needed per acre (four sterile males for every wild female) and determining optimal flying routes and times of day for release. “Senecio has developed sophisticated algorithms and robotic processes set up in assembly‐line formation” to accomplish these tasks.
Netanya‐based BioGenCell is developing a stem-cell therapy to treat a painful vascular disease called critical limb ischemia, a leading cause of amputations. The company’s BGC101 compound, when mixed with the patient’s own stem cells taken from a simple blood draw, creates natural artery bypasses and enhances the formation of additional blood vessels to better supply blood to the damaged tissue.
While other biotech companies are pursuing cures for the same disease using stem cells from bone marrow, BioGenCell’s method is less invasive. When injected, the BGC101 formula “knows” to grow only where revascularization is needed.
OutSense, based on Kibbutz Nahsholim, is developing a device that clips onto a toilet bowl to facilitate frequent and hands-free screening for signs of colorectal cancer.
The device’s spectral isolation and imaging technologies rapidly analyze solid waste for indicators including blood content, microbiome stability, texture and color that could be warning signs for cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis or Crohn’s disease. The smart device can even distinguish among different people in a household based on Bluetooth signals from their nearby devices.
“Such frequent screenings should be at least as successful in detecting digestive diseases as submitting to expensive and invasive colonoscopies once every decade,” writes Wanetick.
In the recent article by Abigail Klein Leichman titled “Could robots replace psychologists, politicians and poets?” published by Israel30c.com, Leichman concludes that AI will never develop a mind that can solve problems. Yet many neuroscientists, computer scientists, and those on the front lines of neural networks, machine learning, and all-things artificial intelligence believe they already have evidence that computers will develop true learning capabilities and some already have.
For the purpose of this essay, I’ll combine machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence into the artificial intelligence monolith. In fact, today there is little difference between three other than their labels and the baggage that each label carries.
Free Will
This debate has been around since humans started asking important existential questions. For most, free will is a given. We just must have it because by most accounts we are free to make decisions or choices save for governmental, religious or cultural restrictions and taboos. Even many theists advocate for free will. Christianity is predicated on it, that God gave us all free will so that we are free to accept the Christian god but don’t have to. Yet aside from these authorities it certainly seems that we have free choice, that we are presented with options and make a decision. Such decisions can be as simple as choosing which flavor of ice cream or as consequential as to whom to marry or what philosophy or politic to endorse.
Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris says not true, and he believes he can prove it. In his best selling book, Free Will, Harris presents several scientific studies conducted over two decades that seem to confirm that free will is a delusion. The studies all conclude that the unconscious brain is what makes each and every decision, then it sends that information (and the conclusion) to our conscious mind where we then go through the motions of deciding something that was already decided, usually about a second before we began our conscious deliberation, sometimes a bit longer or shorter depending on the complexity of what is being considered. Yes. All of this has been measured and the data is quite unambiguous.
So how does this impact artificial intelligence and computers’ ability to think, solve problems, even give psychological advice and direction? If Harris is right, the question itself is misguided, arrogant and flat out wrong, for all the assumptions from which it hinges are incorrect. I must say, this is one of those rare times when new science tends to contradict the prevailing reality of existence, not to mention it’s counterintuitive if not downright unpleasant to consider, which is where I’m at right now.
That said, more on the fascinating topic of artificial intelligence to come, I promise.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
In this segment on artificial intelligence (AI), part four, we’ll look at the augmented human being, part human, part machine. And don’t laugh. Computer or robotic-assisted devices are being used to augment the human condition right now. For but one example, see my previous story on exoskeleton technology.
Another slick piece of wearables allows legally blind people to read newspaper and magazines, or product labels in a grocery store, even the money they take out of their pocket to pay the cashier, using artificial visualization technology.
As neuroscientists unleash the mysteries and power of the human brain while, at the same time, AI researchers build programs that get smart and smarter, even to the point where they become autonomous learners, human anatomy and robotics, along with AI software, will converge into human/machine hybrids, some of which will have more human characteristics than others. In other words, if we live long enough, say twenty more years, we may actually meet Mr. Spock, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Some of my academic friends who are working on this exciting future are not as enthusiastic as you would think. Many fear that the ethics will not keep pace with the technology, that we will create, arguably, a new species whose rights and freedoms will not comport with our justice system as it is today. Others are concerned about the economic value of people in an age where machines and computers will do almost all of the work. What are we going to do with 5 billion in surplus labor for which there will never be a job? Without income potential yet still constantly need to consume goods and services, how will the contribute to the betterment of our species and our world? There are no good answers for any of this yet. But there certainly are many grave concerns over them and many others.
But with all the ethical, economic and social concerns over AI, what most scientists are most anxious over is the notion of singularity. Singularity, as it pertains to AI, is the moment in the future whereby computers will become not only smarter than humans (and their programmers) but autonomous as well. If you haven’t guessed by now, they’re talking about the master/slave relationship between man and machine flipping. How this would exactly happen, nobody really knows. The anxiety of such a time is difficult to imagine. But it’s almost definitely only a few decades away. And while I may be naive, if a bunch of Mr. Spocks started running our world, it’s hard to imagine how that wouldn’t be an improvement.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
With frequent high-profile reports of sites, or even entire networks (Amazon AWS 2017) being shut down by hackers, it does beg the question: Can a hacker shut down the entire Internet? After all, if you can shut down Amazon, the CIA, or Twitter, could not a more wide scale, total blackout of the Internet be a reality?
Answer: Not really, and here’s why.
The Internet was designed to be resilient. In fact, the first vestiges of the Internet go back to the 1960s and the ARPANET and later DARPANET projects commissioned by the U.S. Defense Department. The initial objective was to develop a network of computers that could survive a nuclear attack. As such, redundancy was no afterthought. It was aforethought. Today this interconnectivity exists as the TCP-IP (Transmission Control Protocol – Internet Protocol), commonly known to today as simply the IP protocol.
All said, there are three areas where the Internet is vulnerable. The first one is rather recent, about ten years old. The Cloud. When Amazon AWS was shut down for nearly a day back in 2017, all its customers, primarily small businesses, but not all so small, who decided to put all their web services on AWS, went down too.
Tier-One ISP Backbone is where we are most vulnerable.
There are tens of thousands of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) out there but only a handful provide the backbone of Internet connectivity. In fact, most of the smaller ones are reselling services they purchase and rebrand as their own, typically from a bigger fish that makes their money from volume. Nothing new here.
But the big boys like AT&T, Comcast, Level 3 and Verizon are so vast in the amount of traffic that goes through them that if just one of them went down, 20 to 40 percent of the Internet would go down with them. And nobody really knows if the stress on the other backbone providers would provide a domino effect. So at least theoretically, the Internet could go down for a brief period. But theoretically only. These backbone providers invest billions each year to maintain and upgrade their resilience and redundancy. Actually, these backbone are probably the most redundant systems the world has ever seen. Arguably, not even the Space Shuttle had as much redundancy. So while theoretically possible, the bigger concern is hackers actually hacking their way inside the backbone. No one has ever succeeded in doing that. You’d probably have a better chance of hacking the CIA’s site than you would one of these backbones. The reason is that these companies all preceded the Internet as telecommunications backbones back when telephony was our most treasured and sophisticated communications network. In other words, our backbone providers have decades of experience in providing the most robust security standards, some of which will likely never be made public.
DNS Disruption.
Aside from site hacking whereby one website is compromised due to a deliberate hack of that site, systemic outages either originate from cloud hacking or DNS (domain name service) hacking. DNS providers are basically the folks who manage where your domain points to. In other words, if you own thisismycompany.com, you must tell the DNS where that domain is hosted via IP. So the DNS not only knows your domain name but also tells all other computers the IP (or computer address) where it can actually be found. For fun, you can actually find a website by typing in its IP address only without the actual domain name. What this means is that if a hacker can mess with the IP address it can become a major nuisance, in effect, making your site unreachable while at the same time it is technically functioning. A bizarre state where your Internet browser cannot resolve the multiple redirects that the hacker assigned to say a cloud, like what happened when Amazon AWS went down.
Okay. So a complete shutdown of the Internet is not likely, just like a complete shutdown of our entire power grid. But put that into perspective. Remember when New York City lost power for several days back in the late 70s? Such a moment is a cautionary tale of how we need not a global shutdown of the Internet to be catastrophically impacted. Just imagine if New York City’s Internet went down even for a day. Everything would come to a screeching halt, not just electrical power. Everything. Banking, Gas stations, grocery stores. And if you don’t have a full tank of gas you wouldn’t be driving anywhere either. So despite the Internet’s truly global reach, a localized complete outage would all-encompassing. As a civilization, we have never been so dependable on technology as we are right now. All previous “blackouts” are not adequate comparisons for this very reason. As such, it wouldn’t hurt to have some extra food and water around at the very least.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
By Diane Israel.
In certain areas, and vast swaths of some of them, i.e., the African continent, an estimated thirty to fifty percent of call corn harvest never make it to market. Not because of theft or corruption, but rather due to rodent infestation and inadequate sanitization in general.
Another Israeli company has figured out what to do with aging dialyzers, those devices used as artificial kidneys during patient dialysis. Turns out they work quite well as water filtration systems too. The remainder of this article was originally published in Israel30c.com.
Water security
Caesarea‐based NUFiltration helped solve the problem of what to do with some of the 125 million dialyzers (artificial kidneys used in dialysis) discarded annually worldwide: They sanitize and repurpose these sophisticated filters as water-purification devices for developing countries.
Inside the NUF machines containing four to 640 dialyzers, a single dialyzer can purify 50 to 200 liters of water per hour. “A system with eight dialyzers that costs one‐third of an equivalent, leading filtration system can produce eight liters of water per minute. This is easily enough to supply all of the daily water needs to 200 to 300 people in Africa — in one hour,” writes Wanetick.
The water purifiers are operated with hand pumps or solar power, requiring no chemicals and little maintenance, as their membranes are self‐cleaning. NUF systems are currently operating in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Fiji Islands, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria.
Food security
In Africa, a staggering 30 to 50 percent of post‐harvest corn (maize) fails to reach the market. A lot of that loss is due to rodent, fungus or aflatoxin infestation that happens when the grain is being dried and stored.
Tel Aviv‐based Amaizz resolves this problem with solar- or electric-powered modular drying, disinfection and storage units lined with thermoplastic and capped with anti‐algae meshes. The units’ unique ventilation system balances the humidity, precipitation and temperature.
Amaizz started sales with a unit in Senegal and is developing an add‐on disinfection system as well as a heating system that will be targeted to corn farmers in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The system also could be modified to deal with crops such as wheat, sesame, sorghum, rice, and coffee.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
As cyber attacks have become a daily reality, what many of us don’t fully appreciate is that the Internet is not just one vast interconnection of computers, smartphones, and tablets. Today, a plethora of “things” contain small chips, processors, sensors, and beacons that collect and transmit data analytics, and in some cases, diagnostic information, to a central server. These servers commonly reside in a public or private cloud, and the endpoints from which this data is being collected is becoming known as “Edge Technology” for its ability to invoke bidirectional communications, often vital ones, from the periphery of the Internet’s reach.
These endpoints comprise what now commonly termed the “Internet of Things” (IoT). This means common commodities such as cars, cows, shipping vessels (and their cargo), your dog or cat (through computer chip) are now or will be soon part of the IoT ecosystem. The rest of this article addresses how security can be enabled to protect your automobile (now that it’s literally part of the Internet) from cyber attacks.
This article was originally published on Israel21C.
GuardKnox of Ramla has a Communication Lockdown product that prevents any app, patch or upgrades from making contact with a connected vehicle unless it was specifically sanctioned by the automaker. The device protects vehicles from cyber attacks even when traveling in areas lacking communications signals.
“Suppose an automaker sets the upper range of a particular car’s speed signal at 120 miles per hour. Separately, suppose that the activation of automatic braking requires agreement from two independent sensors. No matter which access points hackers use to try to manipulate the car’s speed or braking protocols, GuardKnox blocks any instructions that are not sanctioned by the car manufacturer,” writes Wanetick.
The Eyes‐On system from Foresight Automotive in Ness Ziona uses stereovision cameras to capture a range of data about objects in the path of the car that pose a potential hazard and warns drivers visually or audibly about these objects.
Foresight has demonstrated in hundreds of tests that at medium distances of 20 to 30 meters, Eyes‐On can determine the distance to the object with an accuracy of 20 to 30 centimeters. The cameras capture between 30 and 45 images per second and achieve near 100% accuracy beginning with the first frame.
Proactive pruning of treetops prevents fires from spreading.
When we think about urban fires, an electrical device malfunction, or a poorly maintained old water heater, or even a lightning strike fill our imaginations as common causes. Plain enough. All of these causes are quite real. Yet unlike forest fires where we understand the way in which flames hop from one tree to another, sometimes even across entire roads, the same situation does occur in urban communities. After all, plenty of trees adorn our neighborhoods. So common are they, and other botanical aesthetics, that we don’t necessarily see the hazards, and part of this disconnect is the way in which urban fires are covered by the news media.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
The focus tends to be on mortal dangers, not technical causes, unlike forest fires which tend to hone in on weather conditions, attempts and degrees of containment, and the number of acres currently scorched.
Fighting Treetop Fire of Jerusalem is developing infrared optical device technology for pruning the tiptop of trees to stop the unfold of active forest fires.
“Fires occurring on the tiptop of trees are often fifty times hotter, and move abundant quicker, than fires on the bottom,” saysWanetick.
Firefighters are ready to use FTF lasers to trim leaves off high branches simply by scanning the lasers across treetops from as secluded joined metric linear unit, as well as from helicopters over troublesome terrains and in windy conditions. Salamandra Zone, another Jerusalem firm, developed a technology enabling people to use elevators to escape high‐rise fires. Ordinarily, elevators square measure avoided just in case of the fireplace as a result of they’re not protected against flames, extreme heat and deadly gases.
https://youtu.be/jHNULh0KmKU
Salamandra Zone’s B‐Air E unit, placed on prime of elevator cabs, converts deadly gases into the breathable air in nanoseconds. Sensors in B-Air E confirm the kinds, concentrations, and blend of chemicals that ought to be free to convert the smoke to air reckoning on that materials square measure burning. The pressure of the refined, cooled air being pushed into the elevator cab prevents smoke from coming into once the elevator is moving or once its doors open. For value-added safety, the units contain an additional battery, pump, and detector. Backup electricity will operate it for a minimum of 3 hours.
By Diane Israel
Israeli study shows ‘natural killer cells’ turn out useful proteins within the female internal reproductive organ and retains memory for higher supporting subsequent maternity
Women WHO have had over one kid grasp that every subsequent maternity tends to be easier than the primary. however physicians and scientists ne’er knew why. Now, Israeli researchers at Hadassah Hebrew University center in the capital of Israel might have cracked this long-perplexing vaginal birth code. The answer plays out sort of a detective adventure story, with twists associate degreed turns and a surprising role reversal wherever the someone goes sensible and saves the day.
Even the name of the key biology concerned supports the adventure story motif: the researchers, LED by academic. Simcha Yagel, head of OB/GYN at Hadassah, are learning “natural killer cells.”
Part of the body’s system, natural killer cells get their swashbuckling name from their ability to wipe out tumors and pathogen-infected cells. These same natural killer cells are swarming within the human epithelial tissue – the liner of the female internal reproductive organ that forms the maternal a part of the placenta throughout maternity.
Natural killer cells facilitate defend the embryo and guarantee its development, though they can also cause issues and are connected in previous analysis with perennial miscarriage.
That’s as a result of “a craniate is actually a parasite or a growth,” Yagel tells ISRAEL21c. “It’s invaded a mother’s tissue. It gets atomic number 8 and nutrients from the mother.”
Most of the time, the natural killer cells hew to their main immune operate. Still, Yagel notes that “70 % of the cells within the fetal-maternal interface ar natural killer cells. That’s an excessive amount of for simply immune protection.”
What else may these natural killer cells be doing? As Yagel and his team continuing their analysis, they found that, instead of kill, alleged natural killer cells truly improve the possibilities of a healthy kid “by manufacturing proteins that support the maternity.”
The mechanism is complicated, however, the result’s, “We shouldn’t decision them natural killer cells. we must always decision them ‘natural builder cells,’” Yagel says.
The most shocking twist: natural killer cells have memory.
This had already been shown in associate degree earlier study observing however these cells fight illness. maybe, once offensive the herpes virus, natural killer cells convalesce at their job the second and third time they encounter the virus. “Without memory, they [would] attack everything that appears foreign,” Yagel says.
Yagel and his team found that identical factor was happening together with his “natural builder” cells in pregnancies on the far side the primary one. particularly, they improved “placentation” – the formation or arrangement of the placenta.
“Our findings might give a proof on why complications of maternity are less frequent in recurrent pregnancies.”
that will facilitate justify why the frequency of developing toxemia, a condition marked by high vital sign and swelling within the feet, legs, and hands, which may end up from inadequate placentation, drops in subsequent pregnancies.
“The likelihood of getting severe {preeclampsia|pre-eclampsia|toxemia of maternity|toxaemia of pregnancy|toxemia|toxaemia} during a initial pregnancy is 2-3 % worldwide,” Yagel says. “Statistically, that’s tons. It is fatal for the craniate or causes medicine deficits. And it will do important damage to the mother.”
“Our findings might give a proof on why complications of maternity, particularly the ‘great obstetric syndromes’ [which embody intrauterine growth restriction and little birth size] … ar less frequent in recurrent pregnancies,” the researchers wrote in their paper, that was printed in might 2018 within the medical journal Immunity.
Screening take a look at may be developed
Yagel’s analysis fits into the realm of biology known as “epigenetics,” that studies the changes in associate degree organism caused by modification of organic phenomenon.
“We discovered a population [of natural killer cells] found in recurrent pregnancies that incorporates a distinctive transcriptome and epigenetic signature,” the researchers added. “We named these cells maternity Trained Decidual Natural Killer Cells.”
Yagel stresses that the analysis continues to be the early part. we have a tendency to don’t grasp nonetheless, maybe, a way to activate the pregnancy-enhancing operate of natural killer cells in initial pregnancies.
The ultimate goal “is to develop a take a look at to screen for risk factors,” Yagel tells ISRAEL21c. By understanding, however, natural killer cells work, “we will raise what’s missing in initial pregnancies and eventually offer some treatment.”
One chance the researchers suggest artificial growth or manipulation of natural killer cells throughout a woman’s oscillation before maternity. That’s doable as a result of natural killer cells with their “memory” operate accumulate in amenorrhea.
“The cells appear to be ‘waiting’ for subsequent maternity,” Yagel says.
Moriya Gamliel, WHO did most of the work for the present analysis as a part of her Ph.D. thesis and is that the lead author of the article in Immunity, holds out a tantalizing direction for future analysis.
“We can attempt to convert the precursors of those memory natural killer cells — that are found within the female internal reproductive organ between pregnancies — into absolutely purposeful ‘memory’ cells which will on paper be wont to treat cases with poor placenta development or maybe diseases outside of maternity,” Gamliel explains.
That said, “What we’ve done up to now isn’t comfortable to create industrial tests,” Yagel adds, and there’s way more work for Yagel, Gamliel and also the team to try and do.
The just-completed study took six years of careful work, together with analyzing tissue samples from over 450 pregnancies.
We asked Gamliel what she felt were the foremost shocking results of the analysis. “That this finding is freelance of epidemiologic information like maternal age or weeks of maternity,” she tells ISRAEL21c. “It doesn’t even need reaching point in previous pregnancies.”
As long because the maternity lasted through the primary trimester, “you still have these memory cells.”
Other team members within the project came from across departments at the Hebrew University, together with the inspiration Laboratories at the Lautenberg Centre for medicine and Cancer analysis, the Magda and Richard Hoffman Center for Human Placenta analysis, the Department of OB and gynecology, and also the Department of organic process Biology and Cancer analysis. extra analysis support was provided by the Department of genetic science and also the Department of medicine at the Chaim Azriel Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
By Diane Israel
Current chemo treatments for adults don’t seem to be effective during a child’s body. The new system unreal in Israel introduces a promising various.
A nanotech system unreal in Israel for transporting malignant neoplasm medication specifically in pediatric patients has been shown to slow tumor growth and prolong life in built mice by forty-two p.c. In most of the Western world, cancer is that the primary reason for death in kids over the age of 1.
The new system meets associate unmet would like as a result of existing therapy treatments for adult cancer patients don’t seem to be notably effective for youngsters because of variations within their physiology and in the method, pediatric cancer cells grow and unfold. In fact, standard therapy will cause severe injury to associate sick kid.
While extremely targeted nanoparticle delivery systems show nice promise in adult cancer patients, studies involving kids are restricted. Prof. Alejandro Sosnik of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, besides college man Alexandra Bukchin, used a mouse model to check their system for the selective transport of the chemotherapeutical drug Dasatinib via nanoscale packaging in young patients.
“The target market is incredibly physiologically fragmented and thus less economically viable for pharmaceutical corporations,” aforementioned Sosnik, WHO focuses on developing special treatments for youngsters with cancer.
“The variations between kids of various ages ar nice, and drug corporations don’t wish to take a position in analysis and development for such slender age ranges. A child’s physiology is incredibly completely different from that of an associate adult, that the growth develops otherwise. the consequences of medication on the growth also are not similar. additionally, clinical trials are seldom conducted on kids for obvious reasons,” he said.
Dasatinib is presently administered in pill type to inhibit the amino acid enzyme, an associate accelerator that acts sort of a switch for activating and deactivating varied cellular processes. Dasatinib will stop cancer growth, however, this sort of the drug is free in the untargeted method, poignant healthy cells yet as cancerous cells.
Maximum potency
The engineering science delivery system developed by Sosnik and his team in the city is meant to move the drug to cancer cells alone, therefore maximizing its potency while not harming healthy tissues. The transporter is created of compound micelles, nanostructures created by the self-assembly of polymers in water and thought of to be a superb technique for transporting medication, partly because of their small size (10 to three hundred nanometers).
Technion college man Alexandra Bukchin. Photo: courtesy
The major innovation within the Technion analysis is that the addition of sugar to the nanoplatforms. The neoplastic cell identifies the sugar and intakes of the delivery system, emotional the drug within the cell and inhibiting the accelerator activity.
In the initial laboratory experiment administrated by Sosnik’s cluster the effectiveness of the new delivery system reduced the dose of the drug required to kill malignant neoplastic disease cells – a cancerous growth of muscles and bones that accounts for concerning ten of tumors in kids – in vitro by concerning ninetieth.
In collaboration with the analysis cluster of Dr. Angel Carcaboso from the Hospital Sant Joan Delaware Deu-Barcelona, the effectiveness of the delivery system was incontestible in vivo exploitation mice carrying growth biopsies from pediatric patients. The delivery system considerably improved the buildup of the drug into the growth and prolonged the median time period of the built mice from nineteen days (in the management group) to twenty-seven days.
“I hope that the delivery system we’ve got developed can improve things and serve to deliver a broad spectrum of antitumor medication,” aforementioned Sosnik.
A paper printed recently within the Journal of Controlled unleash summarizes the three-year study that LED to the primary success in delivering Dasatinib with the assistance of those nanoparticles, and therefore the initial demonstration of the particles accumulating within the growth within the patient’s tissue, during a model of pediatric cancer in experimental animals. The analysis was supported by Technion yet as grants from the Commission.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com