Biogadgetry Unpacked
By Tiffany Toh
Email me: biogadgetry@tiffanytoh.com
Leave a voice message: anchor.fm/biogadgetry/message
Biogadgetry UnpackedDec 24, 2020
#3 - Intraocular Lenses/Cataract Surgery
An eye for an eye.
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My friend Austin joins to chat about the most commonly implanted medical device: artificial eye lenses, or intraocular lenses (IOLs), which replace the natural eye lens, necessary to treat cataracts in millions of elderly Americans. Look out for a nasty, ineffective yet extremely well-documented procedure for ancient eye surgery, an alarming disparity in blindness demographics between the developing and developed world, and constant reminders of how awesome our human eyes are.
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Works Consulted:
Overview of Procedures surgeryencyclopedia.com/Ce-Fi/Extracapsular-Cataract-Extraction.html
Traditional Couching (Schemann 2009) doi.org/10.1076/opep.7.4.271.4174
Femtosecond Laser Outcomes (Alio 2014) doi.org/10.3928/1081597X-20140516-01 (access at tinyurl.com/alio-femtosecond)
Femtosecond Meta-Analysis (Popovic 2016) doi.org/10.1016/j.ophtha.2016.07.005
Demographics in Developing Countries (Book: Wilcon, 2005) books.google.com/books?id=gLJZDD2igCMC&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false (Cited on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract#cite_note-12)
Monofocal vs Accommodating IOLs (Ong 2014) doi.org/10.1002/14651858.cd009667.pub2
Multifocal vs Accommodating IOLs (Hovanesian 2018) dx.doi.org/10.2147%2FOPTH.S182943
Toric IOLs (Kaur 2017) dx.doi.org/10.4103%2Fijo.IJO_810_17
#2 - Organ Chips
Potato chips, veggie chips…. organ chips?
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In this episode, my friend Reyna joins us to dive into the construction and applications of organ chips (aka organs-on-chips or tissue chips), which are small squares of cells and fluid channels that help researchers study drugs and diseases. And, in space, they can help us understand how and why microgravity affects humans and the aging process.
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Works Consulted:
Predicting Bone Marrow Failure (Chou 2019)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-019-0495-z
NASA Organ Chip Podcast
https://soundcloud.com/nasa/organs-on-chips-in-space
Tissue Chips for Drug Screening (NIH)
https://ncats.nih.gov/tissuechip
Video and lots of pictures of Tissue Chips
https://youtu.be/zVlEr8c-OJk
Wyss Institute Overview (Includes cool videos)
https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/human-organs-on-chips/
#1 - Deep Brain Stimulation
Everyone: "You can't just stick electricity into your brain and expect good things to happen." Scientists: "haha deep brain stimulation go zap zap brrrrr"
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In this episode, my friend Kayla Durand and I unpack one of the most bizarre medical implants! Starting from the basics, we discuss the fancy neuroscience, intriguing procedures, and really quite horrifying history behind Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), which is used to treat everything from Parkinson's disease to depression.
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Works Consulted:
Overview and Review of DBS (Perlmutter 2015) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4518728/
DBS for Epilepsy (Salanova 2015) doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000001334
DBS for Depression (Crowell 2019) doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.18121427
Detailed History of DBS (Gardner 2013) doi.org/10.1177/0306312713483678
The Dark History of Early DBS (Oliveria 2018) doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30237-0
Overly Detailed Neuroanatomy of the Basal Ganglia (Lanciego 2012) doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a009621
STN vs. GPi for Parkinson’s (Liu 2014) doi.org/10.3171/2014.4.jns131711
Mechanisms of DBS (Herrington 2016) doi.org/10.1152/jn.00281.2015
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Notes: I am deeply apologetic about my atrocious sound quality. I'm working on it. In discussing the history of DBS and Robert G. Heath, I had assumed that the gay study participant was a volunteer... yeah, no. He had been arrested for marijuana and was recruited for the experiment under legal duress. Somehow, that's the worst part.
#0 - Introduction (Hi!)
(Cover art: me. Music: Justin Maher via Musopen)