There's an article over at The Conversation on using magnetic nanobeads to treat sepsis. Sepsis occurs when the response to infection can:
trigger inflammatory responses throughout the body. This inflammation can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.
This leads to many deaths each year, with estimates of Sepsis affecting more than 1 in 1,000 people in developed countries each year, and can reach fatality rates of 30% to 80% depending on the severity of the condition.
This treatment uses tiny (128 nanometre) magnetic beads coated with a genetically engineered protein, which can bind with pathogens and toxins, and the beads can then be filtered from the blood using a dialysis-like device.
We found that it was able to remove more than 90% of bacteria from the blood of rats in a few hours.
...
The device simply and effectively cleans the blood without the need to first pinpoint the pathogen responsible for the infection because the MBL protein binds to more than 90 different causes of infection and sepsis, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites and toxins.
This has been tested on human blood samples, and in small scale animal trials, and will now go on to larger animal studies. Human clinical trials are expected to be at least a couple of years away.
The original press release is available at the Wyss institute, although the actual paper appears to be paywalled. There are also summaries at Discover magazine, Nature and the Harvard Gazette.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @03:36PM
This is one of the first very interesting ways of *actually* using these nano-scale targeted devices. Very significant.
I guess I could write more pretending to know something, but all I can say is this is as significant to sepsis treatment as discovery of antibiotics.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday September 21 2014, @07:56PM
I think you are overstating the case. OTOH, this is just one of the first (and simplest) nano-scale medical treatments. If you were talking about the eventual development of analogous devices you are probably understating. But "eventually" can take a long time. Eventually I expect artificial antigen specific treatments that don't require a dialysis-like machine. But probably not this decade.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:19PM
Eventually nano devices will have enough sensors, computing/networking, lasers to go in a body by the trillions, find cancer, infections, intracellular junk (see SENS) and destroy or repair the damage. They could also be used as an alternative to biological genome editing methods. They will compare the DNA in your cells to a cloud reference and revert mutations or make new changes.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday September 22 2014, @02:45AM
You mean like these? [youtube.com]
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @06:19AM
yes
Threshold broken for tiny lasers [bbc.co.uk]
New plasmonic nanolaser is cavity-free [physicsworld.com]
Engineers at the University of Michigan and Intel have succeeded in creating the first practical, room-temperature polariton laser. The polariton laser is of extreme interest because it requires just 0.4% of the current required by normal lasers, making it a prime candidate for use with on-chip optical interconnects [extremetech.com]
A smart and versatile theranostic nanomedicine platform based on nanoporphyrin [nature.com]
Cyclodextrin dimer becomes synthetic polymerase [rsc.org]
Longevity Gene in Fruit Flies Hints at Coming Genetic Discoveries to Slow Aging [singularityhub.com]
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday September 22 2014, @01:56PM
please post a title if you post you-tube or other video link, it makes for more pleasant viewing...