From gene-modified pork hitting the shelves to accurately gauging your biological age from just a selfie? This week doesn’t sound any less sci-fi than usual, especially with more advanced in vivo bioprinting being a thing. Check it out!
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3D technologies, such as 3D bioprinting, are offering novel solutions for enhanced patient outcomes. We can include custom implants and even printed tissues here now. But the drawback of these technologies is often the need to introduce the solutions surgically. Methods to print in vivo have been explored, but the limitation of these has been limited penetration.
Now a new method ,showcased in the Science, has proposed using an ultrasound-based technique for deep-tissue level in vivo bioprinting. It combines a a customizable bioink that activates at a specific temperature, a focused ultrasound transducer that heats the area precisely, and a predetermined digital blueprint to achieve these results. The intial results have been promising and the potential application areas are very exciting.
Also, check the report from Caltech!
In a Lancet article from researchers at Francis Crick and Harvard (among many others) have demonstrated an AI tool called FaceAge that can look at a selfie and estimate how old someone’s biological age is, not just their real age. This is based on the findings that we ‘age’ differently depending on our genetics, lifestyle choices, stress, and so on. In this study with over 6,000 cancer patients, the tool helped predict how likely a patient was to survive. Those who looked older than their actual age had a higher risk.
Only an extremely limited list of gene-modified animals is cleared by regulators to be eaten in the United States, including a transgenic salmon that has an extra gene to grow faster, and heat-tolerant beef cattle. And now, a type of illness-resistant pig could soon join their ranks.
British company Genus used the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR to make pigs immune to a virus that causes an illness called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS). It's the same technology that's been used to gene-hack human babies - experiments that have proven far more controversial - and develop medicine in the form of gene therapies.
Trump administration is making waves again, now trying to lower the cost of prescription drugs by setting reference prices to match other developed countries. In a recent post on X, the man himself claimed to cut out middlemen to reduce prices. We know that the American healthcare industry is complex, which has driven the price of even the simplest drugs like insulin to sky-high prices. However, the effects of this sort of strategy still need to be seen, especially since it’s coming right after proposing a 25% tariff on pharmaceuticals. We are not seeing much movement based on this so it will have to be seen how the industry reacts.
TealHealth announced an approval by the FDA for their device: the TealWand. This device is used for at-home cervical cancer testing. The idea is still that you do the test yourself and send the sample to be analyzed. Seeing more of these kinds of devices is encouraging because, according to data, getting tests like these done in the hospital can be intimidating to many, if not impossible, due to location. Although screening is one of the best preventative care methods, it is not done enough, so these kinds of devices are helping.
TealHealth itself is still in a seed stage, having in total raised $23M for furthering their efforts and the first set of TealWands are on track to be shipped in June of this year.
It’s already midway through May, could you believe it! Seeing a lot of green here in Helsinki, and the first outdoor ice cream shops have been open for a bit already. Makes you want to go get one and enjoy the sunshine. We would like to thank again anyone who has read this far and joined us in the first editions of our humble newsletter. We aim to grow it and make it much better so, honestly, we love all the feedback whether good or bad.
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