Ethics as ritual: smoothing over moments of dislocation in biomedicine

Applications of biomedical R&D currently imply substantial societal concerns. This paper explores, based on semi‐structured interviews with scientists in Norway, how biomedical researchers experience and tackle such concerns in their daily work. It shows how ritualised routine responses to dislocatory moments help maintain order in the daily work of the interviewed scientists; they do not address directly but instead smooth over concerns by a ritualised way of using ethics. This may foreclose substantive reflection and function as a stabiliser for ‘business as usual’. Overall, the current way of responding to concerns as described by the interviewees may contribute to a depoliticisation of important issues. The paper contributes to sociological work on ethics by linking it to recent discussions on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and by the empirical research presented. The insights can also help improve science policies such as RRI.     

Interrogating the microenvironmental landscape of tumors with computational image analysis approaches

The tumor microenvironment is an interacting heterogeneous collection of cancer cells, resident as well as infiltrating host cells, secreted factors, and extracellular matrix proteins. With the growing importance of immunotherapies, it has become crucial to be able to characterize the composition and the functional orientation of the microenvironment. The development of novel computational image analysis methodologies may enable the robust quantification and localization of immune and related biomarker-expressing cells within the microenvironment. The aim of the review is to concisely highlight a selection of current and significant contributions pertinent to methodological advances coupled with biomedical or translational applications. A further aim is to concisely present computational advances that, to our knowledge, have currently very limited use for the assessment of the microenvironment but have the potential to enhance image analysis pipelines; on this basis, an example is shown for the detection and segmentation of cells of the microenvironment using a published pipeline and a public dataset. Finally, a general proposal is presented on the conceptual design of automation-optimized computational image analysis workflows in the biomedical and clinical domain.     

De‐legitimising complementary medicine: framings of the Friends of Science in Medicine‐CAM debate in Australian media reports

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has developed into a complex and formidable commercial, sociocultural and political force in Australia, and given its influence, it is a relevant subject for scholars, health practitioners, health communicators, journalists, policy‐makers, and consumers of healthcare products and services. This research will consider a relative newcomer to the claims‐making space about CAM in the Australian health media‐scape; the Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM), an activist group of medical practitioners, researchers, and scientists, founded in late 2011. Using content analysis supported by NVivo, I searched for articles specifically referring to FSM and measured the patterns and frequencies of media frames, intonation and sources that are featured in Australian mainstream news reports between December 2011 and April 2017. The negative headlining and intonation of reports predominated, along with framing CAM as part of a lucrative, undisciplined and unethical industry as well as an illegitimate healthcare approach, more broadly. The findings offer insight into how journalists respond, replicate or reconstruct the framings that are provided by an influential and elite group of medical practitioners and scientists, and readdresses issues surrounding the need for more critical health reporting in Australia.     

Evaluating semantic similarity between Chinese biomedical terms through multiple ontologies with score normalization: An initial study

BackgroundSemantic similarity estimation significantly promotes the understanding of natural language resources and supports medical decision making. Previous studies have investigated semantic similarity and relatedness estimation between biomedical terms through resources in English, such as SNOMED-CT or UMLS. However, very limited studies focused on the Chinese language, and technology on natural language processing and text mining of medical documents in China is urgently needed. Due to the lack of a complete and publicly available biomedical ontology in China, we only have access to several modest-sized ontologies with no overlaps. Although all these ontologies do not constitute a complete coverage of biomedicine, their coverage of their respective domains is acceptable. In this paper, semantic similarity estimations between Chinese biomedical terms using these multiple non-overlapping ontologies were explored as an initial study.MethodsTypical path-based and information content (IC)-based similarity measures were applied on these ontologies. From the analysis of the computed similarity scores, heterogeneity in the statistical distributions of scores derived from multiple ontologies was discovered. This heterogeneity hampers the comparability of scores and the overall accuracy of similarity estimation. This problem was addressed through a novel language-independent method by combining semantic similarity estimation and score normalization. A reference standard was also created in this study.ResultsCompared with the existing task-independent normalization methods, the newly developed method exhibited superior performance on most IC-based similarity measures. The accuracy of semantic similarity estimation was enhanced through score normalization. This enhancement resulted from the mitigation of heterogeneity in the similarity scores derived from multiple ontologies.ConclusionWe demonstrated the potential necessity of score normalization when estimating semantic similarity using ontology-based measures. The results of this study can also be extended to other language systems to implement semantic similarity estimation in biomedicine.     

Hybrid bodies and the materiality of everyday life: how people living with pacemakers and defibrillators reinvent everyday routines and intimate relations

Technologies inside bodies pose new challenges in a technological culture. For people with pacemakers and defibrillators, activities such as passing security controls at airports, using electromagnetic machines, electrical domestic appliances and electronic devices, and even intimate contacts with their loved ones can turn into events where the proper functioning of their device may be at risk. Anticipation of potentially harmful events and situations thus becomes an important part of the choreography of everyday life. Technologies inside bodies not only pose a challenge for patients living with these devices but also to theorising body‐technology relations. Whereas researchers usually address the merging of bodies and technologies, implants ask us to do the opposite as well. How are we to understand human‐technology relations in which technologies should not entangle with bodies because they serve other purposes? Based on a study of the daily life practices of people with pacemakers and defibrillators in the Netherlands and the US, I argue that disentanglement work, i.e. work involved to prevent entanglements with objects and people that may inflict harm upon implanted devices, is key to understanding how hybrid bodies can survive in today's densely populated technological landscape.     

生物医学前沿进展在高等医学教育中的作用与实施策略

近年来生物医学研究发展迅速,生命组学、系统生物学、元基因组学、组织工程与干细胞技术、动物克隆技术等前沿领域的研究成果越来越多地应用于临床实践,使得人类疾病的诊断、治疗和预防方法和方式发生革命性的变化。这种发展必将对高等医学教育产生深刻影响,主要体现在医学人才培养目标的制定、医学课程体系与教学内容的更新、师资提升和教育资源配置等方面。生物医学的快速发展将促使医学教育的课程体系更加开放,基础医学教学内容更前沿,临床医学教学纳入更多新技术、人工智能和信息化等学科内容,同对教师素质和教学资源提出更高要求。     

Blended Natural Support Materials—Collagen Based Hydrogels Used in Biomedicine

Due to their unique properties—the are biocompatible, easily accessible, and inexpensive with programmable properties—biopolymers are used in pharmaceutical and biomedical research, as well as in cosmetics and food. Collagen is one of the most-used biomaterials in biomedicine, being the most abundant protein in animals with a triple helices structure, biocompatible, biomimetic, biodegradable, and hemostatic. Its disadvantages are its poor mechanical and thermal properties and enzymatic degradation. In order to solve this problem and to use its benefits, collagen can be used blended with other biomaterials such as alginate, chitosan, and cellulose. The purpose of this review article is to offer a brief paper with updated information on blended collagen-based formulations and their potential application in biomedicine.     

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for delivery of therapeutic agents: opportunities and challenges

Introduction: Bearing in mind that many promising drug candidates have the problem of reaching their target site, the concept of advanced drug delivery can play a significant complementary role in shaping modern medicine. Among other nanoscale drug carriers, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) have shown great potential in nanomedicine. The intrinsic properties of SPIONs, such as inherent magnetism, broad safety margin and the availability of methods for fabrication and surface engineering, pave the way for diverse biomedical applications. SPIONs can achieve the highest drug targeting efficiency among carriers, since an external magnetic field locally applied to the target organ enhances the accumulation of magnetic nanoparticles in the drug site of action. Moreover, theranostic multifunctional SPIONs make simultaneous delivery and imaging possible. In spite of these favorable qualities, there are some toxicological concerns, such as oxidative stress, unpredictable cellular responses and induction of signaling pathways, alteration in gene expression profiles and potential disturbance in iron homeostasis, that need to be carefully considered. Besides, the protein corona at the surface of the SPIONs may induce few shortcomings such as reduction of SPIONs targeting efficacy.

Areas covered: In this review, we will present recent developments of SPIONs as theranostic agents. The article will further address some barriers on drug delivery using SPIONs.

Expert opinion: One of the major success determinants in targeted in vivo drug delivery using SPIONs is the adequacy of magnetic gradient. This can be partially achieved by using superconducting magnets, local implantation of magnets and application of magnetic stents. Other issues that must be considered include the pharmacokinetics and in vivo fate of SPIONs, their biodegradability, biocompatibility, potential side effects and the crucial impact of protein corona on either drug release profile or mistargeting. Surface modification of SPIONs can open up the possibility of drug delivery to intracellular organelles, drug delivery across the blood–brain barrier, modifying metabolic diseases and a variety of other multimodal and/or theranostic applications.     

融合技术在生物医学领域中的研究进展

融合技术提出的时间虽然很短,但是已经受到了很多国家的重视,并开展许多相关的研究工作.融合技术不仅是一项技术,而且是一种科学发展的趋势.学科间的交叉融合将有助于人类认识和解决更为复杂的科学问题.促进人类社会的进一步发展.本文从生物技术的应用角度来介绍融合技术的发展现状,从中我们可以看到融合技术对于生物技术发展的巨大促进作用,以及生物技术时于纳米、信息科学的依赖性,从而进一步说明融合技术的发展是科学技术发展的必然.     

原子力显微镜在生物医学中的应用

原子力显微镜是观察样品表面结构的一种新的工具 ,它具有比传统扫描电子显微镜更高的分辨率 ,并且可以在生理条件下进行实时观察。同时在分子水平上它还是检测样品之间相互作用力的一个强有力的工具。近年来 ,原子力显微镜越来越多地应用到生物医学的各个方面 ,并且取得了很多令人鼓舞的结果