Ambulance response time can vary widely across cities, depending on traffic patterns and the location of the emergency situation. As a volunteer medic in Jerusalem, Elli Beer witnessed firsthand how a few minutes can make a significant difference in saving a life. His frustration with poor ambulance response times led him to develop an all-volunteer rescue service called United Hatzalah.
In this recently posted TEDMED talk, Beer talks passionately about how a small neighborhood group dedicated to responding to nearby emergencies evolved into United Hatzalah’s network of 2,000 volunteers. Today, volunteers respond to incidents on “ambu-cycles,” motorcycles carrying the same equipment as a conventional ambulance but lacking the ability to transport patients, and have treated more than 200,000 people in the past year. Beer has rolled out the service in Brazil and Panama and plans to expand to India.
Not long ago, Stanford computer scientist Debashis Sahoo, PhD, told investigators at the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine that in a few seconds he could find many of the important stem cell genes that the researchers were used to finding only after spending millions of dollars and years in the lab. “We laughed and said, ‘That’s impossible,’” recalls Irving Weissman, MD, director of the institute, in a recent video. But Weissman went ahead and gave Sahoo information about two key genes - and within a few seconds, Sahoo had used his desktop computer to scour the world’s public gene databases, analyzed that information with the computer algorithm he had designed, and come up with over a dozen genes new genes that were involved in the development of certain kinds of cells. That search, Weissman estimates, saved his team a decade of work and about $2.5 million.
More details are shared in the video above. And as a reminder, big data - and the ways in which people like Sahoo are mining through vast amounts of publicly available information to further research and advance health care - is the focus of a Stanford/Oxford conference being held here later this month.
My colleagues at CIRM beat me to the punch yesterday (Wernig is a CIRM grant recipient) with a nice blog post about the award.
I’ve written several times (here and elsewhere) about Wernig’s research as part of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Essentially, he’s shown that it’s possible to directly convert adult, terminally differentiated cells directly into other types of cells like neurons, without first having to force the cells through a stage called induced pluripotency. It’s exciting stuff.
Wernig, who was in a former life a composer of classical music, joins Stanford researcher Joanna Wysocka, PhD, in the ISSCR hall of fame. She won the award in 2010.
When I recently learned that my cholesterol was a bit high, I was told that a regular exercise routine and a couple of oatmeal breakfasts per week should do the trick to bring the numbers back to a normal range. But for Brenda Gundell, a genetic disease called Familial Hypercholesterolemia, or FH, means that simple lifestyle changes won’t make for a quick fix.
FH affects cholesterol processing from birth, and while the condition is common - affecting more than 600,000 people in the U.S. - it is diagnosed in less than 10 percent of those who have it. Gundell was only 15 when she first heard about FH; her father, just 39 at the time, had such extreme levels of total cholesterol that they led to a fatal heart attack. Fortunately for Gundell, while the disease can be destructive, it is, in fact, treatable. And, with the help of FH specialists at Stanford’s Preventive Cardiology Clinic, Gundell has kept her cholesterol in check for the last 17 years and is looking forward to a long life.
Grundell’s story is detailed in the Stanford Hospital video above.
Although Coca-Cola products are readily available for sale in remote African villages, many of the life saving medicines needed for easily treatable diseases can only be obtained at health clinics located a day-long walk, or further, away. So an innovative nonprofit called ColaLife developed packaging and a method for using the Coca-Cola distribution network to distribute medicines, specifically anti-diarrhea kits, in Zambia.
The nonprofit’s work is highlighted in a new documentary film titled “The Cola Road.” In the above film trailer, ColaLife founders Simon and Jane Berry discuss the project and Tim Llewellyn, designer of the Aidpod device used to deliver medicines in Coke crates, explains how the medicines are packaged and transported. Scientific American’s Talking back blog reports on the success of the project:
Tiny village shops, always stocked with Coke, have now started to receive oral rehydration Kit Yamoyos (kits of life)—and, no, Coke itself is not a particularly good rehydration fluid, despite the lore. Thousands of the kits have been sold already in Zambian rural districts and the Ministry of Health, the film points out, now has plans to use the same supplier network to distribute other types of medicine. The income for the shopkeepers provides an incentive to keep the kits on the shelves.
Marjorie McFadden is not your typical 90-year-old. McFadden retired from her public-school job at the age of 85 and remained very social afterwards, regularly attending social gatherings and playing bingo and pinochle with friends. A condition called achalasia, an unusual tightening of the muscles at the lower end of the esophagus, changed all of that, and McFadden found herself unable to swallow food or water and losing a pound of weight a day. But an innovative procedure at Stanford - the per oral endoscopic myotomy, or POEM - now means McFadden is back to enjoying social gatherings again. Her story is captured in the Stanford Hospital video above.
Whether it’s at a party or in the grocery store aisle, doctors have always been faced with the challenge of patients asking them medical questions outside of the office setting. But now that more physicians are using social media, the question of how to handle medical inquiries in the digital space is becoming an increasing concern.
In this TEDxNijmegen 2013 video, Bertalan Mesko, MD, PhD, discusses using online communication tools to create medical social networks and the challenges in harnessing these communities to crowdsource clinical questions. Pointing to the example of comedian Conan O’Brien jokingly asking his Twitter followers for dermatology advice, Mesko notes that social media can yield misleading medical information and warns, “Crowdsourcing in medicine only works if you know your communities.” Watch Mesko’s full talk to learn more about how he effectively uses online networks to share trusted medical information and why curation is imperative when it comes to crowdsourcing health-care questions.
Earlier today I wrote about a breakthrough method called CLARITY, pioneered by Stanford psychiatrist/bioengineer Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, for rendering intact tissue samples transparent. Above is a video clip showing off the new method’s capabilities. First you’ll witness a “fly-through” of a complete mouse brain using fluorescent imaging. The immediately following clip - it’s spectacular! - provides a three-dimensional view of a mouse hippocampus (the brain’s brain’s memory hub), with projecting neurons depicted in green, connecting interneurons in red, and layers of support cells, or glia, in blue.
Note that in both cases, there was no need to slice the tissue into ultra-thin sections, analyze them chemically and/or optically and then laboriously “sew” them back together via computer algorithms in order to reconstruct a 3-D virtual image of the biological sample. All that was required, after performing the necessary hocus-pocus, was to ”send in the stain” (i.e., use histochemical means to paint different cell types different colors) and move the sample or camera lens or shift the latter’s focal length. Nice trick. With big implications for biomedical research.
Last week at TEDxChange 2013: Positive Disruption, Melinda Gates brought to stage Salim Shekh and Sikha Petra, two of the children featured in the Stanford-produced documentary “The Revolutionary Optimists.” The award-winning film, which was co-directed and co-produced by Maren Grainger-Monsen, MD, and Nicole Newnham, tells the story of a lawyer-turned-social entrepreneur who worked to empower children living in Calcutta’s poorest neighborhood to become leaders in improving health. As described on the film’s website, the youth have “painstakingly track[ed] and collect[ed] data around health issues that impact them – water, sanitation, and infectious diseases” and then made improvements in each of the areas.
The TEDXChange video was recently made available on Facebook (log-in required); scroll to the 1:20 mark to view the movie trailer and to 1:22 to meet Salim and Sikha, who are embarking on a U.S. tour to talk about their work. An amazing figure from the talk: Before the group began promoting polio vaccination, only 35 percent of children in their community were vaccinated. Now 85 percent are.
The latest Stanford Health Policy Forum featuring science and health reporter Pam Belluck is now available online. A staff writer for the New York Times for more than 15 years, Belluck has written about a wide range of health-related topics, including stories for the newspaper’s Vanishing Mind series about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia across various cultures and countries. She also authored the recently released book, “Island Practice”, which chronicles the life of the only surgeon residing on the island of Nantucket.
During the forum, Paul Costello, chief communications officer at the medical school, talked with Belluck about what sparked her interest in writing the book and her distinguished journalism career covering health and science.
