Great Idea: Skin Cell Gun

http://tinyurl.com/6llxde9

          Between 1 - 2 million Americans seek medical attention for burns each year. Most are mild, and heal all by themselves; but some are horrifyingly severe. Severe burns are one of the most difficult injuries to treat because of the constant pain endured by the patient, as well as the extremely high risk of infection. Even if the pain and risk of infection can be decreased, patients are often left with debilitating scars that they carry for life. That’s why, for burn patients, Jörg C. Gerlach is a medical Superman.

            
           Gerlach, along with his colleges at Stem Cell Systems GmbH in Berlin, believe they are about to revolutionize the treatment of severe burns; and they are going to do it with guns. Not just ordinary guns, however; skin cell guns. This experimental gun utilizes a solution composed of the patients own skin stem cells to evenly coat burn sites with the patient’s own cells which then become skin cells. This is much different from traditional methods where individual sheets of the patient’s skin are grown in laboratories and then applied by surgeons. This process is lengthy and complicated, and the resulting layers of skin are highly fragile. The skin cell gun eliminates both these issues, and has already been experimented with several times and has yielded amazing results: many of the patients had little or no scarring left over from their burns!

            
           This is a truly amazing step forward for the medical community. The amount of good this device has the capacity for is incredible, and I look forward to seeing it develop. One of the best ideas I have seen yet.

For more info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y5H9Sasq5U

Great Ideas: Color Coded Surgery

 

    

        If you've taken a biology or an anatomy course, you've probably seen diagrams of the body before in your text books. These diagrams are usually nicely organized and pretty and often color-coded for the convenience of the reader. There is nothing wrong with this; these well-organized diagrams aid readers understanding. However, a real surgeon doesn't see a nice, organized picture like this when he actually performs a surgery.

         The inside of the human body is not exactly pretty; it's dark and confusing and very difficult to work with if you're a surgeon. This problem is part of why disease like cancer that cause tumors can be so difficult to deal with; surgeons have a hard time finding every part of the tumor amongst every other type of tissue inside the body.
         
              As a surgeon, Dr. Quyen Nguyen encounters this problem all too often, and realizes the need for a better way to go about surgery. In this TED talk she discusses Dr. Roger Chen and his team who been developing a kind of molecule marker that could help surgeons by lighting up (literally, with fluorescence) certain tissues (perhaps cancerous tumor tissue) and show them exactly where to cut. This kind of molecule would be a HUGE breakthrough for the medical community, and it's definitely a great idea.