Medical Research

The late 2010s and early 2020s have been a time of remarkable innovation and change across every day and more specialised areas of life. Read about three award winning innovators, and their transformative work, below.

Kürşat Ceylan, Winner of the Edison Award

In a society that consistently leans toward ableism and, in so doing, overlooks even the most prevalent disabilities of modern life, the financial, mental and emotional investment being made by those who have not forgotten some of society’s most vulnerable members is more important than ever before.

Ceylan, an engineer from Turkey, realised how deficient the navigational services available to blind people were by experience. As a blind man himself, he found navigating an unfamiliar city to be incredibly difficult. Balancing a cane, luggage and his smartphone, he set upon the idea of revolutionising navigation for the blind.

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It could be a science fiction movie or a time travel into the future, but it is not. It is now possible to operate diseased livers from virtual models in three dimensions. And without needing to open the patient to see what the doctor is going to find. Since last October, The Infanta Elena University Hospital (Valdemoro) has launched this innovative program of virtual hepatic laparoscopic surgery that consists of generating three-dimensional physical models that accurately reproduce the patient’s anatomy and in which the patient can be simulated. Surgical intervention before carrying it out. In simpler words: the damaged organ – the liver – is recreated in a 3D model with which doctors work before the operation.

“The liver is an opaque treetop, and the tumors that are inside we are not able to see them if we do not touch them. The virtual liver allows us to navigate inside the patient’s liver without having to intervene,” explains Dr. Santos Jiménez de los Galanes.

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In molecular biology, homogenization is a process of bringing the sample you took in equal fractions of composition. Now, you come to know about the biology department in which you will be seeing so many samples and those samples are taken from many living things like rabbit, rat, etc. You would wonder how those samples are produced, and you would wonder how it came into the small glass bottle, and how they are fresh without getting spoiled. The reason for this while doing your analysis you might be in situation to remove any of the part, if the sample is not homogenized properly, if you remove any part from the sample it can alter the whole part, whereas the sample that is homogenized in right way will not alter any of the other part or any of the molecules, if one part is removed.

You could see other process that is been simultaneously done with homogenization which is named as lysis, while autolysis is prevented by maintaining the temperature above zero in the place where tissue is kept. There is some solution that prevent them from getting spoiled, and to prepare that sample you need a living thing and a tissue homogenizer which help you prepare the sample efficiently as you expected.

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There is much debate regarding whether marijuana has a positive impact on our body’s cardiovascular system or whether some of the benefits of cannabis are overstated. One of the issues with previous studies was the fact they were focusing on the THC that is found in the cannabis plant, and the debate ranged around whether consuming the THC in marijuana would have a positive impact on a person’s health.

But what a lot of people did not realize was that it was the CBD in cannabis that could have a hugely beneficial impact on our body. A recent study was done to see whether CBD impacts blood pressure, and the results were very interesting.

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