Free Republic

Curing cancer could soon be as easy as a few taps on your mobile, according to a team of scientists at Rice University who have received $45 million in funding for a novel, implant-based treatment system that could cut cancer death rates by 50%. The funds, granted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, will be used to develop “sense-and-respond implant technology,” with the aim to improve the outcomes of immunotherapy treatments for cancers that are usually difficult to treat. “Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to...

Often debilitating, chronic pain is one of the most common reasons individuals seek medical help. Between 67 to 88 percent of them also suffer from sleep disturbances, including longer and more frequent nocturnal awakenings and poorer sleep quality. Because chronic pain and sleep are thought to be correlated, treatment of one could be beneficial to the other. One such treatment is spinal cord stimulation, which shows mounting evidence it improves aspects of sleep and has demonstrated efficacy in treating a multitude of chronic pain conditions. This treatment involves an implantable spinal cord stimulator that sends low levels of electricity directly...

The novel approach combines traditional chemotherapy drugs with a new method of tumor irradiation. A combination of internal radiation and chemotherapy dissolves tumors in 80% of mice across multiple models. Duke University biomedical engineers have demonstrated the most effective pancreatic cancer treatment yet recorded in mouse models. While most mouse trials consider just stopping growth to be a success, the new treatment fully eliminated tumors in 80% of mice across many model types, including those considered to be the most difficult to treat. The approach combines traditional chemotherapy drugs with a new method for irradiating the tumor. The treatment implants...

OK, I've been living with severe low back pain for about 7 years now. Physical Therapy was a joke, Steroid injections, nope. Epidurals? Nope. Laminectomy? Did some but not enough. RF nerve ablation? Catastrophe. Now they want me to try an electronic implant. And thereby hangs a tale. One doctor is pushing Medtronic, another doctor (in the same medical group!) says no, Abbot Labs is the same but has much better support. So I asks you - anybody have experience with either of them? Comments?

Date Issued: September 8, 2022 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is informing the public about reports of cancers, including squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and various lymphomas, in the scar tissue (capsule) that forms around breast implants. The various lymphomas reported are not the same as the lymphomas described in previous FDA Communications as Breast Implant-Associated Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma (BIA-ALCL). The FDA learned about these reports through our continual postmarket review of breast implants and our ongoing collaboration with external stakeholders. After preliminary review of published literature as part of our ongoing monitoring of the safety of breast...

For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter—bandages, bottles, bananas—will have some kind of smarts thanks to supercheap programmable plastic processors. If you’ve been wondering why that hasn’t happened yet, it’s that nobody has built working processors that can be made in the billions for less than a penny each. It hasn’t been for want of trying; in 2021 Arm reproduced its simplest 32-bit microcontroller, the M0, in plastic, but even this couldn’t hope to meet the mark. The problem, according to engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at British flexible-electronics...

For the price of £230, London tech company Walletmor will implant your hand with a microchip that can be used to make contactless purchases. If you’re down for a little augmentation and like the idea of becoming a walking wallet, all that’s required is a visit to a Walletmor specialist and install its online banking service on a phone or tablet. The implants themselves are around the size of a grain of rice and are made from three elements; the NFC Chip, which acts as the hard drive where your account data is stored and encrypted, the NFC Antenna, that...

[2:41 video clip] "The importance of this is that we are moving very rapidly towards 'Neuralink' implanting a chip into a human head."

The so-called ‘living pharmacy’ will be able to manufacture pharmaceuticals from inside the body The implantable living pharmacy, which is still in the “proof of concept” stage of development, is actually envisioned as two separate devices—a microchip implant and an armband. The implant will contain a layer of living synthetic cells, along with a sensor that measures temperature, a short-range wireless transmitter and a photo detector. The cells are sourced from a human donor and reengineered to perform specific functions. They’ll be mass produced in the lab, and slathered onto a layer of tiny LED lights. The microchip will be...

London (CNSNews.com) – It sounds like the stuff of eschatological literature, but the idea of companies forcibly implanting their employees with microchips is making waves in Britain – although the government says it doubts the practice would be legal. In recent years, companies marketing microchip implants have touted them as a convenient shortcut to many routine tasks. Employing the same technology used in contactless credit cards, the tiny device is generally implanted in a worker’s hand and can be used for such things as opening doors or turning on devices. But groups in Britain ranging from the Confederation of Business...

You walk into a grocery store and pick up eggs. No smartphone? No problem. You swipe your hand across a reader, and the amount is deducted from your bank account. If that sounds far-fetched, you obviously haven’t been to Sweden recently, where thousands of people have reportedly had chips implanted in their bodies. A company called Biohax has already “installed” around 4,000 chips in customers, inserted just below the thumb. They can use the implant to open secure doors, pay for tickets, and share emergency information with medical personnel. The chip is about the size of a Tylenol pill, and...

The use of microchip implants has been a focal point for many science fiction movies and books over the past few decades. Whereas it used to be the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood, the technology has now become a reality for humans. One Wisconsin-based company, Three Square Market, has implanted 50 employee volunteers with a small microchip in each employee's hand. The microchip is about the size of a grain of rice. Read more at http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=2278#h9xpyBj71ogbtKsi.99

A “memory prosthesis” brain implant has enhanced human memory for the first time. The device is comprised of electrodes implanted in the brain, and is designed to mimic the way we naturally process memories, and can boost performance on memory tests by up to 30 per cent. A similar approach may work for enhancing other brain skills, such as vision or movement, says the team behind the work. “We are writing the neural code to enhance memory function,” says Dong Song of the University of Southern California, who presented the findings at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC...

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Researchers in the US have developed an implant to help a disabled brain encode memories, giving new hope to Alzheimer’s sufferers and wounded soldiers who cannot remember the recent past. The prosthetic, developed at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in a decade-long collaboration, includes a small array of electrodes implanted into the brain. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this...

Forget HoloLens, forget smart glasses and forget augmented reality -- scientists have proposed a "cortical modem" that plugs into your DNA and your visual cortex to cure sight loss and show a heads-up display in front of your very eyes. The cortical modem concept is the brainchild of DARPA, the US Defense Research Projects Agency. Originally founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, DARPA is the US military's research and development agency. It's perhaps best known outside of military circles for the development of ARPANET, an early packet switching network that formed a precursor to the Internet....

A trial surrounding Rep. Alan Grayson’s wife’s alleged bigamy has been delayed due to an unlikely medical reason. Lolita Grayson filed court papers this week saying she had been suffering from chest pains. When she went to a hospital to find out the cause, she was told she needed emergency surgery to remove her leaking breast implants and scar tissue, according to the Associated Press. The surgery was Monday; the trial had been scheduled for Thursday in Orlando and has now been rescheduled for March. "Due to this medical emergency, wife is unable to prepare for or attend the trial,"...

http://img.medicalxpress.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/2015/54aed437e8f45.jpg New therapies are on the horizon for individuals paralyzed following spinal cord injury. The e-Dura implant developed by EPFL scientists can be applied directly to the spinal cord without causing damage and inflammation. The device is described in an article appearing online Jan. 8, 2015, in Science magazine.EPFL scientists have managed to get rats walking on their own again using a combination of electrical and chemical stimulation. But applying this method to humans would require multifunctional implants that could be installed for long periods of time on the spinal cord without causing any tissue damage. This is precisely what...

You can inject one under your skin and no one will ever notice. Using short-range radio frequency identification (RFID) signals, it can transmit your identity as you pass through a security checkpoint or walk into a football stadium. It can help you buy groceries at Wal-Mart. In a worst-case scenario – if you are kidnapped in a foreign country, for example – it could save your life. Microchip implants like the ones pet owners use to track their dogs and cats could become commonplace in humans in the next decade. Experts are divided on whether they’re appropriate for people, but...

In March 2009, British researcher Mark Gasson had a chip injected under the skin of his hand. The chip, a slightly more advanced version of the tags used to track pets, turned Gasson into a walking swipe-card. With a wave of his wrist, he could open security doors at the University of Reading laboratory, where his experiment was being conducted, and he could unlock his cell phone just by cradling it.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is launching a $26 million program to help military personnel with psychiatric disorders using electronic devices implanted in the brain. The goal of the five-year program is to develop new ways of treating problems including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are common among service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan."We've seen far too many times where military personnel have neuropsychiatric disorders and there's very few options," says Justin Sanchez, a program manager at DARPA.DARPA is known for taking on big technological challenges, from missile defense to creating...