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DTN 173: Montana pushes frontier of experimental medicine

Plus: Zoox clears hurdle to launch paid robotaxi service, Antares raises $470M, US bans foreign-made humanoids, Intel debuts chip for space computing, an open source AI alliance, electronic noses, and more.

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“The biggest mistake I see with founders is around communication. It's not easy to explain complex technology in a way that evaluators with a technical background will understand. Companies get so entrenched in their own business that they lack the distance to communicate it clearly.”

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Montana’s plan to become an experimental medical hub just pushed forward

“As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to apply to a newly established review board for approval. Once its treatment is rubber-stamped, the company can set the price of the drug and sell it via experimental treatment clinics, the first of which is likely to be up and running around the end of this year.

Montana’s latest right-to-try legislation is unique. While other jurisdictions with similar laws limit access to drugs to people with terminal illness, in Montana access is theoretically available to anyone who gives informed consent and can pay. That includes people desperate for treatments for rare diseases. It also includes those who are interested in longevity and want to try out drugs pitched as preventive therapies.” (via MIT Technology Review)

“These blood-red clumps are what polypropylene microplastics look like in the body of a live mouse, as detected by noninvasive photoacoustic imaging.” Image: P. Stephen Patrick/Olumide Ogunlade

“Most techniques for detecting microplastics in tissue either destroy the tissue or depend on the lifetime of radioactive or fluorescent labels, making them difficult to do outside specialized contexts, says P. Stephen Patrick, a lecturer in medical imaging at University College London.

Patrick and his colleagues relied instead on the inherent absorbance differences between plastic and mammalian tissues. By shooting a pulsed laser at tissue and measuring high-frequency sound waves emitted in response, the researchers found they could map the location of pigment molecules found in plastic but not naturally in the bodies of living creatures. They tested the method by injecting microplastics from ground-up pen lids into mice. This image was taken 1 h after injection, but the plastics were still detectable 3 months later, Patrick says.” (via C&EN)

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