By Lisa Fratt
Big Data
Google dives deeper into health with human data project | MassDevice.com On Call
A hole in the FDA’s approval process for pediatric drugs
By Tom Ulrich
You’d think drugs meant to be taken by children for years would be studied in children for a long time to measure their long-term safety.
You’d think drugs for a condition affecting millions of children would be tested in many, many children to catch any rare side effects.
You’d think all this would happen before the Food and Drug Administration, an agency known for its strict criteria, approved them for marketing.
OpenFDA provides ready access to recall data
By: Taha A. Kass-Hout, M.D., M.S.
Stopping blindness: The drug-eluting contact lens
By David Altman
Growing up, my grandmother’s eyes were always a problem. For years, she was losing her central vision to glaucoma, and numerous surgeries and treatments did not seem to help. Later in life, she could not see my face but could always tell who I was when I was close.
Regrowing corneas: It’s all about finding the stem cells
Severe burns, chemical injury and certain diseases can cause blindness by clouding the eyes’ corneas and killing off a precious population of stem cells that help maintain them. In the past, doctors have tried to regrow corneal tissue by transplanting cells from limbal tissue–found at the border between the cornea and the white of the eye. But they didn’t know whether the tissue contained enough of the active ingredient: limbal stem cells.
The costs of quiescence, for cars and blood cells
By Tom Ulrich
My first car was my grandfather’s 1980 Chevrolet Malibu. For about two years before my family gave it to me, it sat unused in Grandpa’s garage—just enough time for all of the belts and hoses to rot and the battery to trickle down to nothing.
Why am I telling this story? Because it’s much like what happens to the DNA in our blood-forming stem cells as we age.
Silicon Valley in-depth: Unraveling arrhythmia with iRhythm CEO Kevin King
Digital health is all the rage in Silicon Valley, especially as consumer technology’s biggest players are getting more interested in tracking health and fitness. But for companies like iRhythm, the health side of the equation comes first.
Surgical Sam, a beating-heart mannequin, takes the stage
By Tom Ulrich
We often see medical magic in Hollywood, but it’s not often we see Hollywood magic brought into medicine. Now, Boston Children’s Hospital’sSimulator Program and special-effects collaborators at The Chamberlain Group (TCG) have done just that.
Digital disease detection: We see the trends, but who is actually sick?
FDA encourages medical device data system innovation
By: Bakul Patel
Thanks to advances in digital health, doctors and their patients are more frequently using computer systems to collect medical data that can provide useful information on a patient’s health.