PRESSURE-SENSOR CONTACT LENSES

PATIENTS with the eye disorder glaucoma could soon have a high-tech monitor: a smart contact lens that measures eye pressure around the clock.  In glaucoma, elevated eye pressure is one of several factors that can damage the optic nerve, eventually causing blindness. The condition affects about 6 per cent of Singaporeans, accounting for 40 per cent of vision loss.  Now, researchers from the Singapore National Eye Centre are testing a contact lens fitted with a tiny sensor (right), which can detect changes in a patient's eye pressure and send the data to a recorder.  Though the smart lens is made by Swiss company Sensimed, the sensor is made in Singapore - by the local arm of electronics giant STMicroelectronics.

 
PHOTO: SINGAPORE NATIONAL EYE CENTRE

ENERGY-STORE MEMBRANE BETTER THAN BATTERIES

A TEAM from the National University of Singapore's Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative has come up with a new way to store energy that outperforms most batteries.  That has important uses, especially for storing the energy produced by alternative technologies like solar and wind power.  The polystyrene-based polymer membrane (right) can store up to 0.2 farads (a unit of charge) per square centimetre when sandwiched between two metal plates, compared with a millionth of a farad for a standard capacitor.  And it is four to eight times as cheap as lithium-ion batteries. Most rechargeable batteries are based on liquid electrolytes, making them more expensive to produce and make larger.  The research, led by Dr Xie Xian Ning, was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science and highlighted in Nature. 


PHOTO: NUS

REPROGRAMMED HEART CELLS

RESEARCHERS from the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) created beating heart cells from skin cells, which could one day do away with the need for heart transplants.  In the lab, they reprogrammed the skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, a type of cell that can develop into almost any other cell type, and from there into heart muscle cells.  Instead of using a virus to carry materials that reprogram the original cell into a stem cell, they used a short ring of DNA known as a plasmid.  This method is safer for patients than using a virus, which carries a risk of infection after surgery.  Their breakthrough could benefit the 5,000 patients here who are treated for heart failure each year, including advanced cases which can be treated only with a heart transplant.  And these reprogrammed heart cells could be used to study an individual patient's genetic response to medicine if they originate from the patient.


PHOTO: NATIONAL HEART CENTRE SINGAPORE

MASTERFUL STOMACH SURGERY

PATIENTS with stomach tumours may no longer need a lengthy operation, or even an external cut, with the world's first robotic endoscopic stomach surgery.  In this technique, a flexible endoscope tube is inserted into the patient's mouth and into the stomach. A surgeon controls small robotic arms on the tube, and delicately removes a tumour in the soft stomach wall without puncturing the stomach.  The technology, named Master (Master And Slave Transluminal Endoscopic Robot), was developed by Professor Lawrence Ho of the National University Hospital's gastroenterology and hepatology department with Associate Professor Louis Phee of Nanyang Technological University's mechatronics and design division.  It does away with the need for an external incision and leaves no scar, unlike current keyhole surgery, and takes less time than regular surgery, which can take several hours.  So far, it has been tried on five patients in India and Hong Kong, as the condition is uncommon here. The first such surgery here will be performed in March next year.

HOW SWINE FLU STRAINS EVOLVE

AFTER a pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, the spotlight was on swine flu, which had contributed to the culprit virus' genetic mix.  This year, after one of the longest-running (34 years of data, 12 years of blood and virus samples from Hong Kong) and most extensive studies of swine flu viruses, Duke-NUS researchers found that transporting live pigs across geographical boundaries, specifically, caused swine flu viruses to mix with local viruses and form new strains.  That leads to an increased diversity of swine influenza viruses, and makes finding vaccines for each newly mutated version more difficult.  The study, published in Nature in May, demonstrated how the 2009 H1N1 flu virus could have emerged, been imported and assembled to infect humans, though it did not find the 2009 H1N1 virus in its samples, which were from Hong Kong.