Category Archives: BioEngineering

The future of webOS -- the innovative mobile software that three successive CEOs at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) have struggled to make into a profitable product -- may lie somewhere in the windowless rooms of a Stanford Medical School radiology lab.

That's where researcher Andrew B. Holbrook is working on ways to operate a cutting-edge, million dollar medical scanner with the help of a discontinued model Palm smartphone that he bought online for $50.

HP had bigger things in mind for webOS when it paid $1.4 billion to buy Palm two years ago: Executives talked about putting Palm's critically praised software on millions of phones, tablets and even PCs. But after a predecessor abruptly abandoned those plans, CEO Meg Whitman decided in December that HP would release the code under an open-source license, which means other companies and individuals like Holbrook are free to come up with their own uses.

And while many experts say it's unlikely the software will ever supplant more widely used mobile operating systems from Apple (AAPL) or Google (GOOG), analysts say webOS could find a new life if developers use it to create applications for specialized automotive, industrial or medical equipment, such as Holbrook's MRI scanner.

Stanford's Holbrook, who has a Ph.D. in bioengineering and a tinkerer's enthusiasm for writing code, has been working with other researchers on using the MRI in conjunction with new treatment techniques for removing tumors or unwanted cells without invasive surgery. But as a sidelight, he's used webOS software to create new applications for tracking and adjusting some of the MRI's functions.

Holbrook uses those apps on a modified phone, as well as an HP TouchPad tablet, from which he's removed most of the metal components so he can take them into the room where patients are treated with the massive magnetic scanner.

That can save time, he notes, and perhaps let doctors and technicians interact more closely with patients. Most MRIs are typically operated with more bulky computer equipment that sits outside the heavily shielded scanner room, both to protect the computers from the powerful magnet and prevent them from causing radio frequency interference with the MRI image.

"These are incredibly useful tools," Holbrook said of the webOS gadgets. Holbrook added that he doesn't really want to go into the software business himself, but he's hoping that some health care company or medical device-maker will eventually pick up on his work.

Whether that creates any kind of financial return for HP remains to be seen.

"It's a head-scratcher," said Al Hilwa, a software analyst for the IDC research firm. "Clearly HP has decided they're not going to be able to make money on webOS right away. But it doesn't hurt to have a small ecosystem of developers who are still working on it out there."

HP acquired Palm in a 2010 deal negotiated by then-CEO Mark Hurd, who was ousted in an unrelated scandal before the company could launch new Palm products. His successor, Leo Apotheker, touted the first webOS tablet as a rival to Apple's iPad. But when initial sales proved weak, Apotheker abruptly halted production on new webOS devices last summer.

Experts debate the pros and cons of webOS: While critics said it could be slow at times, fans said it had innovative features, including an elegant approach to operating several applications at the same time.

Many believe HP's biggest problem was taking too long to bring its webOS products to market, after Apple locked up the tablet business and Google's Android had already become the leading alternative to Apple's software for smartphones and other gadgets.

Top HP executives, however, insist they're still enthusiastic for webOS. While ruling out new smartphones, Whitman told this newspaper in December that HP may one day produce webOS tablets again. She recently told the industry news outlet CRN that the software has "huge advantages" over both IS and Android, and that she still believes HP can build a business around it.

HP says it isn't ready to disclose plans for a webOS business. But Sam Greenblatt, a veteran HP manager now helping lead the webOS group, hinted in an interview that he expects other companies will find ways to use the software.

"I'm not going to tell you who's going to make hardware or who's not going to make hardware, but I don't believe webOS is going to be an orphan for long," he said.

Meanwhile, the company has announced a timetable for releasing elements of webOS over the coming months, until it's fully available under an Apache open-source license in September. Experts say that will give the company time to make sure none of the elements are subject to patent claims or other licensing issues.

HP also is adding some elements in hopes of making webOS more appealing to independent developers. These include an open-source development tool called Enyo, which programmers can use to create applications that will run on webOS and other mobile operating systems, including IS and Android, as well as on PC browsers such as Explorer and Firefox.

The additions acknowledge what most consider a rule of mobile software: Consumers won't use an operating system unless it comes with lots of applications that serve up information and services, but developers won't build new applications unless they can reach a wide audience of users.

By extending the reach of webOS developers to other operating systems, Greenblatt said, "more people are going to be writing more apps."

Analysts praised the new features, but several said other developer tools offer similar benefits.

"There's no doubt that webOS has its fans," said Stephen O'Grady, an open-source expert with the RedMonk analyst firm. "But at the end of the day, for most developers the attractiveness of the platform is a direct function of the size of that platform's audience, and for webOS, at this point, it's a rounding error."

Like Hilwa, however, O'Grady suggested there could be demand for using webOS in niche devices such as retail kiosks, printers or industrial equipment.

Other webOS enthusiasts have suggested that some phone or gadget-makers may ultimately turn to webOS as an alternative to paying royalties for Android, which has been hit with patent infringement claims from Microsoft, Oracle (ORCL) and others.

"An open-source webOS, backed by HP or Palm's patent portfolio, should be an attractive alternative to the existing, entrenched mobile platforms," suggested Rod Whitby, the Australian leader of a loose-knit group of "home brew" programmers called WebOS Internals.

Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey

Mobile software Platforms

HP's webOS lagged far behind other smartphone operating systems in number of users, according to comScore's report on U.S. market share in the fourth quarter of 2011:

Google (Android): 47.3 percent.
Apple (IS):
29.6 percent.
RIM (Blackberry):
16 percent.
Microsoft (Windows Mobile/
Windows Phone):
4.7 percent.
Symbian (used by Nokia): 1.4 percent.
HP/Palm (webOS):
1 percent.

Source: comScore
Mobile's

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After scrapping bigger plans, HP says webOS still has an open-source future

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Newswise — What if we could engineer a liver or kidney from a patient's own stem cells? How about helping regenerate tissue damaged by diseases such as osteoporosis and arthritis? A new UCLA study bring scientists a little closer to these possibilities by providing a better understanding how tissue is formed and organized in the body.

A UCLA research team discovered that migrating cells prefer to turn right when encountering changes in their environment. The researchers were then able to translate what was happening in the cells to recreate this left–right asymmetry on a tissue level. Such asymmetry is important in creating differences between the right and left sides of structures like the brain and the hand.

The research, a collaboration between the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Center for Cell Control at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, appears in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Circulation Research.

"Our findings suggest a mechanism and design principle for the engineering of tissue," said senior author Dr. Linda L. Demer, a professor of medicine, physiology and bioengineering and executive vice chair of the department of medicine at the Geffen School of Medicine. "Tissue and organs are not simply collections of cells but require careful architecture and design to function normally. Our findings help explain how cells can distinguish and develop highly specific left–right asymmetry, which is an important foundation in tissue and organ creation."

Using microtechnology, the team engineered a culture surface in the lab with alternating strips of protein substrates that were cell-adhesive or cell-repellent, analogous to a floor with narrow horizontal stripes of alternating carpet and tile. Cells may encounter such surface changes when they travel through the body.
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The researchers observed that as the migrating cells crossed the interface between "carpet" and "tile" sections, they exhibited a significant tendency to turn right by 20 degrees, and, like a marching band, lined up in long, parallel rows, producing diagonal stripes over the entire surface.

"We had been noticing how these vascular cells would spontaneously form structures in cultures and wanted to study the process," said first author Ting-Hsuan Chen, a graduate student researcher in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA Engineering. "We had no idea our substrates would trigger the left–right asymmetry that we observed in the cells. It was completely unexpected.

"We found that cells demonstrated the ability to distinguish right from left and to self-organize in response to mechanical changes in the surfaces that they encounter. This provides insight into how to communicate with cells in their language and how to begin to instruct them to produce tissue-like architecture."

According to the researchers, the cells can sense the substrates beneath them, and this influences the direction of their migration and what shapes they form in the body. Of most interest, the researchers said, was the fact that the cells responded to the horizontal stripes by reorganizing themselves into diagonal stripes.

The team hopes to harness this phenomenon to use substrate interfaces to communicate with cells and instruct them to produce desired tissue structures for replacement. By adjusting the substrates, the researchers say, they have the potential to guide what structures the cells and tissue form.

The next stage of the research will be to control and guide cells to self-organize into two-dimensional and, eventually, three-dimensional patterns chosen by the researchers.

According to the research team, this is one of the first studies to demonstrate that encountering a change in substrate can trigger a cell's preference for turning left or right. It is also one of the first studies showing that cells can integrate left–right asymmetry into a patterned structure of parallel diagonal stripes resembling tissue architecture.

"Applications for this research may help in future engineering of organs from a patient's own stem cells," Demer said. "This would be especially important given the limited supply of donor organs for transplant and problems with immune rejection."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Additional authors included Jeffrey J. Hsu, Alan Garfinkel and Yin Tintut from the UCLA Department of Medicine; Yi Huang and Chih-Ming Ho from the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Xin Zhao, Chunyan Guo and Zongwei Li from the

Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System at China's Nankai University; and Margaret Wong from the UCLA Department of Bioengineering.

For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.

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UCLA Discovery that Migrating Cells "Turn Right' has Implications for Engineering Tissues, Organs

HUNTINGTON -- Hongwei Yu, chief science officer and co-founder of Progenesis Technologies, is in the market for new business cards after the company hosted a grand opening in its new Huntington office and lab in the Red Cross Building .

As West Virginia's only locally owned and operated genetic engineering company, Progenesis recently changed its address from South Charleston to Huntington, a move that was celebrated during a grand opening at the new office Friday.

The company has long had ties to Huntington, as it is a spin-off of sorts from Marshall University, where Yu is a professor.

The company, which was founded in 2008, had been operating out of South Charleston until moving into the Red Cross Building and beginning renovations in January.

Most of the Progenesis work force lives in Huntington, so Friday's grand opening had been eagerly anticipated, Yu said.

"We are very excited to get to work so close to home," Yu said. "It will make a big difference between shuttling back and forth. We work with the Biotechnology Center at Marshall, so this will allow us to come in anytime we want to or need to and be able to do our work more efficiently."

Progenesis is a research and development company, which is focused on demonstrating the feasibility of manufacturing its genetically-engineered bacterial alginates on an industrial scale.

Bacterial alginates absorb water quickly, which makes them useful in everything from the agricultural and food industries to the cosmetic and drug markets.

In addition to the new office space, Progenesis' new digs include a bigger, brighter lab space for employees to do their work in, said Richard Niles, CEO of Progenesis.

"It really is going to be a wonderful place to work," Niles said. "We are on an upward curve of developing our product and the company, and these new facilities are part of the attraction of significant revenue that will allow us to add more employees, which is what we need to continue to produce and test the product of this company."

While the company is the only one of its kind in the state, Niles said he sees a bright future for biotechnology in Huntington.

"We are part of a new group of companies, which, locally, includes Vandalia, in biotechnology, which is a growing field. It's one that is going to diversify the economy in Huntington," Niles said. "Anyone who is curious about what we do is welcome to come and look at what it is we're doing. All it takes is giving us a call setting up a time to visit."

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Bioengineering company bringing ideas to Huntington

CHICAGO (Reuters) - An implantable, wireless microchip delivered osteoporosis medicine to a small group of Danish women, raising hope for a new kind of drug delivery device that might allow patients to skip regular injections, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

The device, now being developed by privately held Microchips Inc, has a wireless receiver that signals the microchip to release the drug.

"Until now, you never had any way you could do this," said Dr. Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, who helped to develop the technology and is a board member of Microchips Inc.

Langer said the device could be used for different types of injectable drugs where getting people to take their medications regularly is a problem.

That is often the case in patients with severe osteoporosis, who tend to skip doses of their medications because they cannot tell whether or not the injections are affecting the density of their bones.

That is something the microchip was designed to overcome, said Robert Farra of Massachusetts-based Microchips, which paid for the study. Farra, Langer and colleagues published a paper on the study in Science Translational Medicine.

Instead of constantly releasing small amounts of drug, like most drug-delivery systems, the microchip releases medication on command all at once, much like an injection would.

It can be activated by telephone or computer using a special radiofrequency reserved for medical use to safeguard against accidental release of the drug, Langer said.

GOLD NANOPARTICLES

The microchip itself is a thin wafer, about the size of a small coin, made with tiny wells that hold concentrated doses of medication. These doses are covered with a layer of gold nanoparticles, which dissolve when exposed to a certain radiofrequency. The wafer is implanted under the skin with a receiver device that is roughly the size of a heart pacemaker, Langer said.

In the system's first test in people, the team implanted the device in eight Danish women aged 65 to 70 with a severe form of osteoporosis which required injections of Eli Lilly & Co's hormone treatment teriparatide.

The researchers sent daily signals to the microchip device to release the drug for up to 20 doses. Then, they followed up with a period in which the women took hormone injections.

As seen in animal studies, a fibrous collagen-based membrane developed around the device, but the drug still performed just as well as daily injections in the women, improving bone formation and reducing the risk of fractures, the researchers said.

Still, there were some hitches.

John Watson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego, said in an editorial the device failed to work in one of the patients, and that data was not included in the analysis.

And the team had some manufacturing issues and was able to manufacture only one device with all 20 reservoirs filled with the study drug. Even so, all doses in the microchips were released in the patients, a sign that the device could work in people, Watson said.

"Several years are still needed to bring this technology to approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and to the clinical promise reflected in this small study," Watson wrote.

The current device holds only 20 doses, but Langer said the group is working on adding more doses to the device.

The company hopes to have a version of the device on the market in five years. Langer said he sees potential for other uses, such as treating diabetes or delivering cancer drugs.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/xUUOwu Science Translational Medicine, February 16, 2012.

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Microchip delivers drug; can it replace shots?

A microchip inserted under the skin has been shown for the first time to successfully deliver a bone-loss drug to a small sample of women, according to US-led research published Thursday.

The device may someday allow patients to avoid daily injections of medication and permit doctors to adjust their doses from afar, said the study which appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

"We hope this really is the dawn of a whole new way of thinking about delivering medications," said co-author Robert Langer, a professor of cancer research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Langer and colleagues presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Canada. Langer addressed the conference by phone.

The device is about the size of a pacemaker, or a computer flash stick, and contains daily doses of medication inside small wells that open up either on a predetermined schedule, or when the chip is given a wireless signal to release the drugs.

Each well is covered by a nano-thin layer of gold which protects the drug and prevents it from being released.

The wireless signal causes the gold to dissolve and allows the drug to enter the bloodstream.

In this case, researchers tested the device on seven women aged 65-70 in Denmark who were prescribed the drug teriparatide for osteoporosis. The microchip was implanted just below their waistlines.

After tracking the women for 12 months, researchers found that the treatment improved bone formation and reduced the risk of bone fracture, and delivered the drug just as effectively as daily injections.

However, the same issues that raised concerns in animal studies were also observed in the women: the formation of fibrous collagen-based tissue around the microchip.

The presence of the tissue had raised concerns among researchers over its potential to interrupt drug delivery, though no such problems were observed in the one-year study, after which the women had the chips removed.

Lead author Robert Farra, president and chief operating officer at MicroCHIPS, which was founded by some of the researchers and licensed the microchip technology from MIT, said the device is best suited for potent drugs needed in small but regular doses.

"For the 200 million people worldwide with osteoporosis, and for patients with many other diseases, taking a daily injection is not an appealing way to take every day for a chronic disease that you may face for the rest of your life."

No adverse events were observed in the patients in the study, though one had a device implanted that malfunctioned and did not release the drugs. Farra told reporters that diagnostic changes have been made to prevent such problems in the future.

He added that the cost was likely to be $10,000-$12,000 per year, comparable to the current costs of administering the osteoporosis drug that the team tested.

Scientists plan to continue studies on the microchip delivery system in heart disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer and chronic pain. The device is likely about five years away from potential market approval, the authors said.

The technology was first envisioned about 15 years ago, and according to an accompanying editorial in the journal by John Watson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, many questions still remain.

Among them, how reliable and durable the chip may be over time, and how it may be adapted to other diseases -- a process he likened to a meandering path with many sharp turns.

"For Farra, Langer, and colleagues, the 'hairpin' road to the clinic might be long and winding, but a versatile implantable device that exploits the microchip approach for controlled drug delivery will be well worth the wait for patients with chronic diseases," Watson wrote.

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Microchip successfully delivers bone-loss drug: study

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Histogenics Corporation, a privately held regenerative medicine company, today announced that the Company will present at the 7th Annual New York Stem Cell Summit on February 21st at Bridgewaters New York City. Kirk Andriano, Ph.D., Vice President of Research and Development for Histogenics, will speak about current and future cell therapies being developed by the Company as it works toward commercialization. Lead candidates include NeoCart®, an autologous bioengineered neocartilage grown outside the body using the patient’s own cells for the regeneration of cartilage lesions, and VeriCart™, a three-dimensional cartilage matrix designed to stimulate cartilage repair in a simple, one-step procedure. NeoCart recently entered a Phase 3 clinical trial after reporting positive Phase 2 data, in which all primary endpoints were met and a favorable safety profile was demonstrated.

Dr. Andriano earned his BS in chemistry and biology from Utah State University and his MS and Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Utah. Prior to his work at Histogenics, he was the Chief Technology Officer for ProChon Biotech, Ltd. which was acquired by Histogenics in May 2011.

About Histogenics

Histogenics is a leading regenerative medicine company that combines cell therapy and tissue engineering technologies to develop highly innovative products for tissue repair and regeneration. In May of 2011, Histogenics acquired Israeli cell-therapy company ProChon BioTech. Histogenics’ flagship products focus on the treatment of active patients suffering from articular cartilage derived pain and immobility. The Company takes an interdisciplinary approach to engineering neocartilage that looks, acts and lasts like hyaline cartilage. It is developing new treatments for sports injuries and other orthopaedic conditions, where demand is growing for long-term alternatives to joint replacement. Histogenics has successfully completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials of its NeoCart autologous tissue implant and is currently in a Phase 3 IND clinical study. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company is privately held. For more information, visit http://www.histogenics.com.

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Histogenics to Present at 7th Annual New York Stem Cell Summit