WebZine
2017.04
What's New
Treating Depression With tDCS: Startup Ybrain Aims for the Mainstream
By Eliza Strickland
Posted 26 Jan 2017 | 16:00 GMT
A doctor’s prescription for clinical depression could one day sound like this: In the comfort of your own home, slip on a brain-zapping headband a few times per week. For 20 minutes, send a tiny stream of electricity through your brain.
The treatment would be delivered by a user-friendly type of brain stimulation called tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation), which has recently become a hot topic in neuroscience research. Now it’s beginning to make the transition from lab to doctor’s office. And a South Korean startup called Ybrain thinks its stylish tDCS headband, specifically designed to treat depression, will be the product that brings tDCS into the clinical mainstream.
3 Squishy Medical Robots That Are as Soft as You Are
By Eliza Strickland
Posted 31 Mar 2017 | 15:00 GMT
The inside of the human body is mostly squishy (that’s a technical term), and our soft innards don’t always fare well when hard objects are placed inside. Not only can sharp edges damage organs and blood vessels, but the body’s defense system can also surround the foreign object with scar tissue and interfere with its intended function. So researchers are working on soft robots that may be better tolerated within the body, permitting machines to make intimate contact with human tissue without jeopardizing safety.
These three experimental bots are designed for different purposes—two are implants, one is a potential surgical tool—but they all showcase a gentler kind of robotics, enabled by new materials and flexible actuators.
Ybrain founder and CEO Kiwon Lee made his pitch earlier this month at the NYC Neuromodulation conference, where doctors and researchers working on the cutting edge of brain stimulation met to compare notes and chart the field’s progress. When his turn came at the podium, Lee predicted that his device will receive regulatory approval in Korea this March. He also laid out his very optimistic game plan for worldwide market domination.
Lee says Ybrain will roll out the device in 70 Korean hospitals this year to reach thousands of patients with clinical depression. The company will use data from all those patients to build a case for approval in Europe, Lee says, and then in the United States, where the regulatory requirements are most stringent. “After one device is approved by the FDA, it will be seen as a mainstream treatment,” he says.
Ybrain’s tDCS device may not be first to make it to the all-important American market; the New York-based Soterix Medical has a tDCS system for depression that’s already approved for clinical use in Europe, and the company is pursuing FDA approval now. But the European patients using the Soterix device are mostly using it in the clinic under a doctor’s supervision. Ybrain hopes to make its at-home treatment the norm.
Heart Hugger
Inside the chests of 41 million people around the world, failing hearts gradually become less effective at the vital task of pumping blood. Some heart failure patients get on the list for a transplant, while others receive metallic pumps called ventricular assist devices (VADs) to help their faltering organs. But VADs increase the risk of blood clots, which can form as the liquid flows over surfaces made of metal and plastic.
Drug Doser
When you think of Swiss clockwork, “soft” and “yielding” may not be the first adjectives that come to mind, so researchers at Columbia University get full marks for creativity. By replicating a watch mechanism called the Geneva drive in a soft hydrogel, they created a biocompatible robot that could tick along to release doses of drugs from inside the body
Gentle Grabber
Today’s surgeons use various gripping tools to wrangle with your viscera; they may use one tool to nudge aside fat tissue, for example, while using another to cut away tumors on the kidney. While surgeons are scrupulous in their attempts to avoid unnecessary harm to the tender flesh, they might have an easier time with Xuanhe Zhao’s soft tools.