Mark Tibbitt News Today

Self-healing gel can be injected into the body and act as a long-term drug depot

The printer generates vaccine-filled microneedle patches that can be stored long-term at room temperature and applied to the skin.

Boston MA (SPX) Apr 26, 2023 - Getting vaccines to people who need them isnt always easy. Many vaccines require cold storage, making it difficult to ship them to remote areas that dont have the necessary infrastructure. M

MIT researchers designed a tabletop vaccine printer that could be scaled to produce hundreds of doses in a day and deployed anywhere vaccines are needed. The doses are contained within microneedle patches that can be stored long-term at room temperature and applied to the skin, avoiding the need for injections.

The need to keep vaccines cold makes global shipping a challenge. Researchers say their hydrogel approach could change that.

Vaccine distribution faces big challenges, as the COVID crisis has shown. Now, a multidisciplinary research team has overcome some of the major issues that plague the distribution of biomedical materials.

Doctors say the procedure is the first of its kind in the world and they credited their in-house perfusion machine with making the feat possible.

A cancer patient (right) has recovered his quality of life, after a world first transplant where he was given a damaged human liver has been treated and preserved in a machine for three days.

The multidisciplinary Zurich research team Liver4Life has succeeded in doing something during a treatment attempt that had never been achieved in the history of medicine until now: it treated an originally damaged human liver in a machine for three days outside a body and then implanted the recovered organ into a cancer patient.

Typically, a liver can't be stored on ice for more than 12 hours. This means this new machine could enable a lot more transplants than currently possible.