Hasta La Gadget!

The PharmaJet is a spring-loaded gun which fires drugs through your skin, direct into the body. Needle-free injection systems aren’t new, but the PharmaJet has some advantages over older designs.

First, there’s that spring inside, cocked by putting the unit into a box and cranking a handle. This avoids the need for gas-canisters which need to be replaced and recycled. Next up is the actual injection head. This is loaded from a vial of medication, just like you’d do with a needle syringe, and then popped into the gun. You push the whole unit hard up against the skin, hit the trigger and a thin jet of delicious medicine is forced through the skin and into the body.

Once done, the tip is tossed away. This single-use design avoids contamination, and because there are no sharp bits, it’s easier and safer to dispose of the used parts.

For the last two weeks I have had to suffer the Lady jamming a needle into a roll of my belly-fat and plunging a syringe anti-coagulant into my body, to keep things flowing in an immobile broken-leg. While she has drawn blood once, and also hit a muscle (God knows how she found a muscle under the carpet of flab), I think I still prefer the needle. Used properly, you feel almost nothing. With the PharmaJet I’d be screwing up my eyes in anticipation of a sting like you get from a rubber-band fired from point-blank range (although apparently the gun doesn’t actually hurt).

The PharmaJet is approved for use in the US, so maybe you’ll start seeing this Star Trek style tech in hospitals soon.

PharmaJet product page [PharmaJet via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Terrifying 'Kid-Friendly' Syringe Disguised as Mouse
• BioShock's ADAM Syringe Brought to Life

Got a mysterious, infuriating itch down there? Then pee on your cellphone, wait a moment, and you’ll know whether you just need to take a shower, or a trip to the doctor.

This is the promise of new research in England, where £4-million ($6.5m) has been given to the UK Clinical Research Collaboration to develop this disposable tech. You don’t have to actually urinate on your phone (unless it is an old pre-Android Motorola handset, in which case you might want to anyway). Instead, you will put a few drops of urine or saliva onto a computer chip which you will then plug into the phone. This laboratory-on-a-chip then chugs into action, analyzing the sample and giving a diagnosis within a few minutes.

The actual details of the chips are still undisclosed, but they will be cheap. The idea is to sell them in vending machines in the same places you would buy condoms, for prices as low as 50p to £1 (80-cents to $1.60), making self-testing into an easy and discreet affair, encouraging those who would normally avoid doctors to check themselves out. The chips would be “about the size of a USB chip,” according to the Guardian, and plug straight into the phone or PC. This makes it likely that it would hook-up via micro-USB, something compatible with pretty much everything except the iPhone.

According to the project chief, Dr Tariq Sadiq, “Britain is one of the worst [countries] in western Europe for teenage pregnancy and STIs (sexually transmitted infections).” As a Brit myself, I can confirm this: When not taking drugs or roaming the dismal streets looking for people to stab, young Britons like nothing more than drunken, dangerous sex. Targeting the tech-savvy, cellphone-loving generation with these tests seems a very smart thing to do.

Mobile phone kits to diagnose STDs [Guardian]

Photo: Ron’s Log/Flickr

We’ve already seen that living tissue can be printed using what amounts to a bio-inkjet printer, and some researchers from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine now say they’ve made some considerable progress that could bring the technology one step closer to use on the battlefield. Specifically, they’ve been able to speed up the healing of wounds on mice using a “printed” swath of tissue and completely heal the wound in three weeks, whereas an untreated wound did not heal itself in the same time period. Of course, there’s no word on any plans for tests on humans just yet, but the researchers do plan to take one more step in that direction by moving on to tests on pigs next.

Researchers tout progress with ‘skin printers,’ hope to one day treat battlefield wounds originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are two pacemakers in the picture above. There’s the typical clunky, stone shaped device with wires on the right — and on the left, a device dwarfed even by a one-cent coin. This is the Medtronic wireless pacemaker, just revealed at TEDMED 2010, which can be implanted directly into your heart via catheter and permanently latch itself into flesh with tiny claws. Then, doctors can wirelessly monitor and even control the device from a nearby smartphone. Medtronic’s working to make it even smaller still, and we’re hoping to get more information soon. Welcome to the future, folks.

Medtronic debuts tiny lead-less pacemaker at TEDMED 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 21:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The human body is weird. A U.K. man recently underwent surgery to remove a tooth growing in his ear. And who could forget the tale of the newborn baby who had a fully-formed foot growing in its brain!? Crazy, right? But, as it turns out, it’s not just the occasional misplaced tooth or aberrant foot, everybody is a freak. According to a recent discovery: we can taste with our lungs.

Researchers at the Maryland School of Medicine recently published their findings regarding a strange discovery: we all have bitter taste receptors growing in our bronchial tissue. The team came upon the find accidentally while pursuing unrelated research into muscle receptors in the lungs.

The bitter taste receptors are the exact same kind located on the tongue, but with two differences: unlike on the tongue, the lung receptors are not bunched into taste buds, and they don’t seem to communicate directly to the brain.

However, these findings may have very real implications for asthma patients. Bitter taste receptors tend to tighten or constrict muscle tissue around them. These lung receptors may exist for a very practical reason: to prevent bitter-tasting plant based poisons from entering the body. But in asthma patients, these reactors may become stimulated by man-made chemicals that they mistake for naturally-occurring plant toxins.

Just nuts.