ClinicalTrial
Latest
Uterus transplant recipient gives birth for the first time in the US
A woman who received a uterus transplant has given birth to a baby -- a first in the US, Time reports. She is part of an ongoing uterine transplant clinical trial taking place at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas and she, like the other women in the trial, has a nonfunctioning or nonexistent uterus. Her uterus was donated by another woman, Taylor Siler, who wanted to be able to give someone else the opportunity to have a child. The trial, which accepts both living donations, like Siler's, and donations from deceased individuals, will complete 10 transplants. Eight have been completed already and while at least three have failed so far, a second trial participant is now pregnant following a successful transplant.
Robot that performs surgery inside your eye passes clinical trial
The next time you go under the knife for retinal surgery, it may not be a human hand holding the blade. That's because a revolutionary surgical system developed University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, which just passed its first set of clinical trials, is able to perform these intricate operations better than even the steadiest surgeon.
Injectable male contraceptive tested successfully on monkeys
It's 2017, and male birth control methods haven't really advanced beyond the vasectomy -- a procedure that's been performed since the 1800s -- or condoms. That's what makes Vasalgel so intriguing. It's a "potentially" reversible method that uses gel to chemically incapacitate sperm as they pass through the vas deferens. It doesn't stop sperm production, and, like with a vasectomy, the swimmers are just absorbed into the body. In a recent experiment, male rhesus monkeys given the treatment didn't sire any offspring during a year-long study.
Ultrasound implant can help chemo drugs reach brain tumors
One of the biggest problems with brain cancer treatment is that only a limited amount of chemotherapy drugs make it through. See, our brain's blood vessels are tightly lined with cells to keep out toxins and pathogens. The bad news is that it also hinders medicine from reaching tumors. A team of French scientists have recently tested a promising answer to that issue: an ultrasound implant that they designed to temporarily make this "blood-brain barrier" permeable. They ran a pilot with 15 patients suffering from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and results showed that their technique successfully allowed more medicine to pass through.
Subretinal implant successfully tested on humans, makes blind narrowly see
How many scientists does it take to properly install a lightbulb? When that lightbulb is an implant that stimulates retinal photoreceptors to restore one's sight, quite a few -- even if they disagree whether said implant should be placed on top of the retina (requiring glasses to supply power and video feed) or underneath, using photocells to channel natural sunlight. Now, a German firm dubbed Retina Implant has scored a big win for the subretinal solution with a three-millimeter, 1,500 pixel microchip that gives patients a 12 degree field of view. Conducting human trials with 11 patients suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, the company successfully performed operations on seven, with one even managing to distinguish between similar objects (knife, fork, spoon) and perform very basic reading. Though usual disclaimers apply -- the tech is still a long way off, it only works on folks who've slowly lost their vision, etc. -- this seems like a step in the right direction, and at least one man now knows which direction that is.
