A robotic system designed to care for millions of biological samples in sub-zero temperatures has been chosen as a finalist for a top engineering award.
The Polar system is already used at the UK Biobank, a facility that aims to shed light on debilitating diseases.
The robot system will guard 10 million human blood and fluid samples at -80C for 25 years, whilst also allowing scientists to access them at any time.
It is one of four finalists which will compete for the annual MacRobert award.
The prize is given out by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering for technological and engineering innovation.
The other finalists are the first commercially available bionic hand, an advanced filter to remove soot from diesel engines and a tiny silicon sensor which can detect explosives or toxic chemicals.
Deep Breath
The Polar system, designed by the Automation Partnership, consists of a series of ultra-low temperature compartments designed to hold blood and urine samples, which can be accessed automatically by robotic arms.
The liquid-nitrogen cooled store has been designed so that researchers do not have to enter a refrigerated area to retrieve or load samples.
It has been used by pharmaceutical companies as well as the UK Biobank, a medical research facility which intends to collect samples and data from more than 500,000 volunteers.
This will be used as tool by researchers investigating a range of life-threatening illnesses including cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
It already contains data from more than 100,000 volunteers.
It is one of three technologies with potential medical benefits that have been picked as finalists for this year’s awards.
A novel kind of chemical sensor, designed by Owlstone, a spin-out of Cambridge University, also has therapeutic uses.
The chemical chips are able to detect trace amounts of a wide variety of chemicals using a patented technique called Field Asymmetric Ion Mass Spectroscopy (FAIMS).
It fingerprints compounds by analysing how their charged forms move through a gas when subjected to electric fields. Each substance has its own characteristic signature.
The sensor can be reprogrammed to look for different chemical fingerprints, such as those found in pre combustion fumes during the initial stages of a fire.
However, one potential use is as a “breathalyser” to detect and diagnose illness by analysing chemicals on a patient’s breath.
It is known that asthma sufferers, those with cystic fibrosis and some forms of cancer breathe out chemical markers of their condition.
Trudy Forte discusses her work developing nano-sized low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles that can be used as a safe and effective means of delivering anticancer drugs to brain tumors, particularly the most common malignant brain tumor in adults and one of the deadliest forms of cancer.
A research team led by scientists at MD Anderson Cancer Center report that 2 specific common inherited genetic variations are associated with increased risk of lung cancer for smokers and former smokers.
Dr. Amos talks about how the findings are a major step forward in identifying those at high risk for non-small cell lung cancer and for understanding how smoking and genetic factors interact to cause the disease.
The wheels continue to turn on Europe’s billion-euro project to put a robotic rover on the surface of the Red Planet.
Engineers working towards the flagship ExoMars mission have unveiled a sophisticated new vehicle prototype.
The demonstrator will test a possible suspension and locomotion set-up to be built into the final rover design.
ExoMars, which has yet to receive final sign-off from space ministers, is scheduled to leave Earth in 2013 and land on the fourth planet a year later.
It will carry a suite of instruments across the Martian landscape, looking for signs of past or present life.
The new prototype, developed by the Canadian MDA Corporation, will help engineers understand how the real rover will behave when it moves through the rocky terrain.
“This will be the first element that touches the surface of Mars as ExoMars rolls off the lander,” explains Nadeem Ghafoor, MDA’s manager of planetary exploration.
“And when you’ve decided where you want to go, this is the system that gets you there and gets you over any obstacles on the way,” he told BBC News.
An experimental gene therapy treatment appears to have helped eight children with a rare and incurable neurological disorder, although it may have been responsible for the death of one, researchers reported on Tuesday.
They said the treatment appeared safe and effective enough to try in more children with late infantile neuronal ceroidlipofuscinosis, or LINCL, a form of deadly Batten disease.
The treatment, in which a virus carrying the corrective gene was infused directly into the brain, appeared to slow the decline of eight out of 10 children treated, Dr. Ron Crystal of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and colleagues reported.
“We are encouraged by this. It’s not a cure,” Crystal said in a telephone interview.
Like all forms of gene therapy, the hope is that the mutant cells will take up the new gene and start working normally.
Children with LINCL start showing symptoms at about age 4. They lose coordination, vision and speech and usually die unable to breathe on their own, between 10 and 12.
One child suffered an epileptic seizure weeks after treatment and died and another child died of unknown causes two years after treatment.
Eight of the children showed a measurable slowing of the inevitable decline usually seen in the condition.
Only about 200 children are alive with the disease globally at a given time.
“The disease is caused by mutations in the CLN2 (ceroid lipofuscinosis, neuronal 2) gene,” Crystal and colleagues wrote in their report, which was published in the journal Human Gene Therapy.
