this is cool!

This for me was the highlight of the Health 2.0 conference.

video link here

I first heard about this project from Dean at a Churchill Club event last year. He said at the time more than 3,000 soldiers have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan without arms.  The Luke arm promises to dramatically improve the quality of life of amputees.

Gizmag reports the introduction of the second generation Lifestraw, a portable, personal water filtration device for the developing world. Previous sharkride post here. Check out the video below, and consider giving the gift of clean water to those in need this Holiday season. Lifestraws can be purchased through World Outreach for $24.95 - if you buy one, the organization will donate a second one as well, so your contribution has 2x impact.

great story about the potential of franchising for economic development and better healthcare in Africa.  Franchising, coupled with micro-lending, holds the potential for huge quality-of-life improvements in the developing world.  The is also the model Dean Kamen envisions for his water purification systems, but he says, there is ridiculous resistance for innovative solutions from global aid agencies, as well as well-funded foundations and non-profits.

More than one billion people are without access to safe water, and nearly half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne diseases. Over 6,000 people – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water.

Developed by The Vestergaard Frandsen Group of Denmark, the LifeStraw is an innovative, mobile water filtration system, and a practical response to this urgency. The straw costs about $3.50. [thanks, BBC]

[UPDATE: 10-11, 2006:  The LifeStraw is catching on - check out this NY Times article printed yesterday.]

Invented by Russian designers Vladislav Kropachev and Vladimir Makarov, this innovative syringe button allows consumers to comfortably inject medicine. The dosage and perscription information can be printed on top.

More information is available here (in Russian).

[thanks, Nick Baum]

We will be post Arthur C. Clarke’s vision by a factor of 19 earth years, but having already exceeded it, we fall woefully far behind in our conquest of the solar system. However, in some ways, we will have made the visions of Star Trek’s 23^rd Century biomedicine seem primitive, in a decade and a half.

I should say that the main caveat to these predictions is a major nuclear or bioterrorist event, which could lead to an urban exodus, due to a lack of faith in the government’s ability to protect large population centers.

First prediction: A Heart Attack Will Achieve Obsolescence

There are genetic factors that predispose to certain arrhythmias, which unlike coronary artery disease, are not a simple plumbing problem. Already, with 64-slice CT scans, we have largely usurped the God of Angiography from his pedestal, by offering a non-invasive picture of coronary arteries. Radiation and risk of contrast material mitigate the use of these techniques, however, advances in MRI, and decreases in CT scanning time, will translate into chronological snapshots that will take the guesswork out of cardiac evaluation. Advances in endovascular repair will be superseded by nanotechnological intervention, which will evolve from clinic-based platforms to constant bystanders, which will monitor and correct defects, such as thrombus, and embolism.

We will find, I am sure, that there is a root inefficiency of the heart, apart from average mortality, that is present irrespective of genetic proclivities to certain arrhythmias. If it can be expressed as a ratio that certain increased activity will translate into sudden cardiac death, for instance, then constant monitoring via implantable devices will become standard. If the heart fails, the time to allocating a new, workable device, either by ingrafting the old with donor matched sells, or quickly rushing the patient to a hospital where a biosynthetic substitute can function as an intermediate. It will be interesting when a biosynthetic replacement will outperform the original – probably not by 2020, but I would not be surprised if one were designed by 2040.

By SHARKRIDE guest author David Harris

Current genomic sequencing methods cost an estimated $20 million to map a human genome, but George Church and colleagues at Harvard Medical School have discovered a much more cost efficient method (approximately $2.2 million), which was reported in the scientific journal Science in August, 2005. The method leverages advances in digital photography technology to essentially photograph microscopic, color coded beads. Church says the cost could eventually be reduced further to about $1,000 per genome.

The implication of this innovation is that the possibility is within reach that you could get your genome sequenced at your doctor’s office, and have customized drug treatment and prevention solutions tailored to your unique genetic makeup. Personalized medicine company Perlegen Sciences Inc., which recently received a $50 million equity investment from its research partner, pharmaco Pfizer Inc., is one company researching the genetic component of disease and formulating differentiated treatment solutions.

[Thanks, CNN, Science, George Church, Venture Wire]