HOSPITAL-ACQUIRED INFECTIONSIn the United States, attempts to control hospital-acquired (nosocomial) infections are proving ineffective, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).In fact, hospital-acquired infections are estimated to be one of the top-ten causes of death in the U.S., claiming 90,000 lives every year.In this episode, we look at how Dijon Hospital in Dijon, France, is protecting its most vulnerable patients with a new mobile infection control technology from AirInSpace..
NANOMEDICINE AND TARGETED CANCER THERAPY Please feel free to comment on our NanoMedicine and Targeted Cancer Therapy series. .
SAFER SPINE SURGERY?Dr Randy Betz, an orthopaedic spine surgeon and Chief of Staff at Shriners Hospitals for Children, Philadelphia, who is Principal Investigator for an ongoing, multi-site, randomized postmarketing study of PediGuard, presents the studys preliminary data. .
Heart Failure Intervention - Sunshine Heart is a medical device company focused on commercializing C-Pulsean implantable, non-blood-contacting heart assist therapy for treating people with moderate heart failure: a condition in which the heart progressively loses its ability to efficiently pump blood throughout the body.C-Pulse reduces the symptoms of heart failure through the use of counterpulsation technology, which enables an increase in cardiac output and coronary blood flow and a reduction in the hearts pumping workload.Sunshine Heart currently has an IDE application under consideration by the FDA seeking approval to conduct a US clinical trial with C-Pulse.In this episode, Sunshine Hearts CEO Don Rohrbaugh discusses early heart-failure intervention. .
Unclogging the Forks: A bifurcation is an area where one main blood vessel branches out into two smaller vessels, like a fork in the road: one being the continuation of the main vessel, the other one often referred to as the side branch. Narrowings at a bifurcation are very commonmore than 500,000 bifurcation coronary lesions are treated each year. But even using drug-eluting stents (DES), the restenosis rate in bifurcations is a startling 23-26 percent. Thus, having a device specifically designed for bifurcationswhich is a significant unmet clinical needshould help avoid many of these clinical problems. Professor Joachim Schofer of the Center for Cardiology and Vascular Interventions, Hamburg, Germany, gives his perspective on bifurcated stents, in general, and the Stentys birfurcated stent, in particular.
DNA Vaccines - In this episode, Dr. Richard Heller of the University of South Floridas College of Medicine and the Moffitt Cancer Center discusses how electroporation works to deliver a DNA vaccine and enhance the potency of that vaccine as well.Dr. Heller is currently the principal investigator in an ongoing Phase I melanoma clinical study to test the safety and tolerability of direct intratumoral delivery of plasmid-based IL-12 using the electroporation system of Inovio Biomedical. .
VANISHING STENTS: What if there were a stent that could promote natural remodeling of an injured artery after angioplasty and then just disappear? In this episode, we consider a Paris-based company REMODELING TECHNOLOGIES ("ART"). ART's stent is designed to provide the requisite initial acute mechanical scaffolding but, as it dismantles due to bioresorbability, the possibility of arterial remodeling returns to the artery.
Rafael Neiman, M.D., of Orthopedic Trauma Surgeons of Northern California, discusses how he injected a 49-year-old female patients own bone marrow stem cells into the fracture and nonunion sites of both her legs that had not healed since injured in a skiing accident seven months earlier.It has been widely reported in the scientific literature that percutaneous delivery of a high concentration of adult stem cells can enhance the rate and amount of bone formation.
Dr. Robert Johnson, a spine surgeon based in San Antonio, Texas, talks about his ongoing study using autologous adult stem cells to facilitate spinal fusion instead of using bone harvested from a patients pelvis, which may create two potential problems: (1) graft site morbidity (complications may include bleeding, infection, and chronic pain at the donor site in the pelvis); and (2) failure to fuse.
The Company's FDA-cleared SmoothShapes® 100 device is a painless, non-invasive laser-based system that works gradually and effectively to improve the appearance of cellulite by reducing its underlying cause: subcutaneous fat.A multi-center clinical study of the SmoothShapes® device concluded that 81 percent of patients experienced significant volumetric reduction in subcutaneous fat.
PediGuard, which is developed and marketed by SpineVision, is the first patented, wireless, hand-held drilling instrument capable of accurately detecting changes in tissue type, thus alerting surgeons to potential pedicular or vertebral breaches during pedicle screw site preparation. .
Stem cell therapy made possible at the point-of-care by Harvest Technologies and its BMAC® System for concentrating autologous adult stem cells. .
A compound initially developed as a "binder" for highway paving may revolutionize bone-and-ligament-and-tendon orthopedic surgical procedures. OsteoCrete is being developed as a magnesium-based bone void filler that can attach bone, as well as ligaments and tendons, to bone. here to comment.