Faster low-power CT scans!

"Standard CT scanners can generate images of patient's body in less than five minutes today, but the radiation dose can be equal to about 70 chest X-rays. Lower-powered CT scans can be used in non-emergency situations, but it can take more than four days to produce those images. Intel and GE created an algorithm that speeds up a computer's ability to process the low radiation dose scans by 100x, from 100 hours per image to one hour."

http://freepress.intel.com/community/news/blog/2012/03/12/computing-power-speeds-safer-ct-scans

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/12/199244/algorithm-brings-speedier-safer-ct-scans

I definitely like this as I get CT scans at least once a year. We try to keep aware of my exposure to radiation, and we definitely prefer MRI's to CT scans, so this is a great step in the right direction.

GE calls the technology Veo, so that's what to ask for when you're told you need a CT scan.

From the article:
As Baker described the breakthrough, "The joint team ultimately developed an accelerator based on 28 Xeon processors totaling 112 cores and a dramatically improved algorithm. We reduced the compute time to around an hour, delivering superior medical images and reducing the X-ray power by up to 90 percent."

As I was reading through some of the Slashdot comments, I came across a post that said this had already been done by some scientists using the graphics processors in video games such as the Sony Play Station. I'm not really an expert on the processing power of console game units, but I understand it's pretty incredible. A couple of years ago the U.S. Air Force bought something like 1,700 Playstation 2's to rig together to form a small supercomputer for the Academy, and this has become a fairly common technique for filling the need for inexpensive supercomputing requirements: they may not be as fast as a dedicated mainframe or supercomputer, but they're tremendously faster than a PC or PC network.

http://phys.org/news198934846.html

Organ transplants where the recipient is able to discontinue immunosuppressive drug use!

This is REALLY big news! It will be quite interesting to see what the follow-up studies report.

"Researchers have for the first time managed to give patients a complete bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor. The recipients were also able to accept kidneys from the same donors without the need for immunosuppressive drugs. Normally, such transplants would trigger graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) — an often deadly complication that occurs when immune cells from an unrelated donor attack the transplant recipient's tissue. The researchers report that five of eight people who underwent the treatment were able to stop all immunosuppressive therapy within a year after their kidney and stem-cell transplants, four of which came from unrelated donors (abstract)."

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/2159252/drug-free-organ-transplants-from-unrelated-donors

A new cancer treatment?

A 17 year old student just won the "$100,000 Grand Prize in the Individual category of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Her project was entitled “Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.”

Her creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and Photoacoustics."

She's been working on this for over two years and wants to go in to chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, or physics.

Wow. The Swiss Army Knife of cancer treatment, and improved imaging. This is going to be great!

Geek.com article
Slashdot thread

Get Smart About Antibiotics week

was last week. "...an annual observance in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its medical and public health partners try to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance."

Wired: Antibiotic Awareness Week article


The EU recently passed a resolution, not the same thing as a law, decrying antibiotic use to promote growth in livestock.

Wired: European Union Antibiotic resolution


And just in time, a new drug-resistant superbug is making life interesting in European hospitals. "Klebsiella pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract, and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to a class of medicines called carbapenems, the most powerful known antibiotics, which are usually reserved by doctors as a last line of defense. The ECDC said several EU member states were now reporting that between 15 and up to 50 percent of K. pneumoniae from bloodstream infections were resistant to carbapenems. To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them. Experts say primary care doctors are partly to blame for prescribing antibiotics for patients who demand them unnecessarily, and hospitals are also guilty of overuse."

Slashdot: European superbug

There was a panel at the IDF conference that I really wish I could have attended

It was on how immuneglobin treatments are prepared, I don't recall if they were talking about Hizentra specifically. They pool 10,000 plasma donations to make a treatment lot/batch, this gives a wide mix of antibodies which our immune-deprived bodies might actually be able to use. Each donation, less than a liter (though I don't know exactly how much) yields 4 grams of IgG.

I'm currently on 10 grams of Hizentra a week (50 ml), which means I need the equivalent of 2.5 plasma donations per week for my continued treatment. So my hypothetical lifeline is five people donating plasma every 2 weeks. For the rest of my life.

Wow.

I'll definitely have to attend that manufacturing panel if I ever get another opportunity. And I definitely regret having not donated blood and plasma as often as I could have. I did donate regularly and donated over a gallon, but I guess you can never do enough.

My Bicentennial Infusion

Thursday, August 13, 2009 was my first infusion. 25 months (and a smidge more), and I'm doing my 200th infusion as I write this. That means 800 needle sticks in my abdomen, 1000 needles disposed of, over eight football field lengths of tubing used, almost 7 liters of medicine infused (6955 ml) representing 1217 grams of actual immuneglobin (IgG).

I don't want to think how much my insurance company has had to pay to keep me reasonably healthy.

And I have been healthy mostly, especially considering that it was four pneumonias in five months that pushed me into a crisis and got me the diagnosis of hypogammaglobulinemia. I take a very perverse pleasure in telling people that I don't have an immune system, then following it up with saying that mine's borrowed.

We're actually reducing my dosage. I'm currently doing 60 ml a week (12 grams) and we're cutting it to 50 ml. (I do two infusions a week with the dose halved, it's a lot more comfortable but doubles the needle sticks) I've been maintaining a pretty good IgG level, my last lab work had it at 1010 with the normal range about 700 to 1600. The doctors at NIH say that I should be healthy with my level in the 900's, so we're tapering my dosage down and we'll see if the frequency at which I get sick increases. If I can get it down to 40 ml, I'll switch to once a week which will be more comfortable. When I started, I was doing 60 ml in a single infusion, then it was increased to 70 ml and I had to use two syringes as one will only hold 60 ml, and that last hour was pretty painful. Each infusion site is considered capable of holding 10-15 ml of fluid (from what I've heard) which means 60 ml is pushing it and 70 is over. So since I was already using two syringes, I had them double the tubing set quantity and I started doing it twice a week. MUCH more comfortable.

(I started with a different med that had a lower gram dose per ml so now 60 ml of Hizentra is the same dose, 12 grams, as 70 ml of Vivaglobin)

It will be interesting to see if I can get down to 40.

Another interesting thing that came out of my visit to NIH was they did an abdominal CT scan and apparently there are visible air bubbles in my abdomen from the needle sticks! These are cumulative from the little bubbles in the lines, since I'm doing abdominal injections, a bubble in the doesn't carry the same hypothetical risk of a cerebral aneurysm that a direct injection to a blood vessel might carry.

Modified T Cells used successfully to fight cancer

This is pretty amazing. Doctors removed T cells from a man with severe leukemia, basically re-programmed them to go after cancer, and put them back in his body.

Nothing happened for 10 days.

Then "...hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia."

CT scans, biopsies, etc.: all negative. This was a year ago. He lost two pounds after this intense reaction ended, basically it was the mass of the cancer that had been destroyed. This is an experimental treatment, but very promising: they tried it on three people, one other had a total remission like this case, the other a partial remission.

NY Times Article: An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer

Using diamonds to fight cancer

I've been meaning to publish this for a while and am just now getting around to it. The problem is that chemotherapy is not concentrated, it flushes out of your body too quickly. This is an interesting process: they use industrial diamonds, chemically treat them so that they are sticky to the chemo drug, then they're blended, making a grayish slurry. The combo is injected directly into the tumor, and the diamonds help the chemo to persist inside the tumor, so more is delivered to the tumor and the treatment becomes more effective.

NPR diamonds article

Re-engineering drugs! Refining marijuana and ecstasy for medical applications.

Some interesting stuff. They're mapping the genome of marijuana to refine the medical aspects and reduce the narcotic effects. Personally I'd prefer to see tougher restrictions on alcohol and loosen them on marijuana.

NPR marijuana article

For ecstasy, they've found that it is extremely effective against blood cancers and lymphomas. It has to be concentrated to dosages that would be lethal, so they definitely have some work ahead of them.

BBC ecstasy article

A cure for cancer and virii?

Regarding virus:

"...researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

…In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever."

Huh. It will be very interesting to see how future testing continues to play out. It could definitely be useful to those of us with borrowed immune systems.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/08/possible-progress-in-medicine.html

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/10/1917232/New-Drug-Could-Cure-Nearly-Any-Viral-Infection


Regarding cancer:

This is a fascinating study. Researchers injected three humans who have chroniclymphocytic leukemia with a new drug. One of the subjects was told that he only had weeks to live. The results? "...made the most common type of leukemia completely disappear in two of the patients and reduced it by 70 percent in the third. In each of the patients as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away in a few weeks, and a year later it is still gone."

The side effects of the treatment were fever, aches and pains: basically the same thing that people go through when fighting any infection. The drug is "a modified, harmless version of HIV ... they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients."

The researchers weren't able to get any funding from pharmacy because it was such a strange approach, but they were able to get enough funding to try it out on three people, and hopefully the results will get them more funding for more tests.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44090512/

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV