Researchers at Rutgers University have developed a new venipuncture robot that can not only draw blood and perform medical laboratory tests, but also provide immediate analyses of blood samples at point-of-care locations, such as clinics, private doctor’s offices, and rural environments.
It’s a development that could give clinical laboratories new opportunities to support physicians. But, should blood labs, phlebotomists, and medical technologists feel threatened by this development?
“This device represents the holy grail in blood testing technology,” said Martin L. Yarmush, MD, PhD, Bioengineer and Translational Scientist, Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University, and senior author of the study, in a news release. “Integrating miniaturized robotic and microfluidic (lab-on-a-chip) systems, this technology combines the breadth and accuracy of traditional blood drawing and laboratory testing with the speed and convenience of point-of-care testing… Continue reading.
A study by a team of researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine (MGH-CEM) and Shriners Hospital for Children has made a technological advancement toward accelerating the discovery of drug targets for obesity, type II diabetes and other metabolic diseases. The novel experimental and computational workflow involves the first use of rodent gastric bypass models, state-of-the-art mass spectrometry and an array of bioinformatics tools to begin unraveling how gastric bypass surgery leads to weight loss and a resolution of type 2 diabetes. Their report on the impact of the surgery on liver metabolism appeared last month in the journal Technology.
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Martin Yarmush, MD, PhD, director of the MGH-CEM and co-corresponding author of the paper, stresses the multi-disciplinary nature of the work. “Investigators in the field have long sought after this type of multi-omic analysis on a rodent gastric bypass model to study metabolic disease, but the work required expertise in rodent surgery, multi-omic analytics, and computational biology. At the CEM, we enable engineering scientists to tackle complex problems in biomedicine at a world-class research hospital in collaboration with clinicians. This work will likely be of great interest to biotechnology companies aspiring to build their drug pipeline in the metabolic disease area… Continue reading.
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