medicine

With Big Pharma spending upward of $1 billion to bring a single drug to pharmacy shelves, its little wonder that unprofitable afflictions like malaria and African sleeping sickness go largely ignored. Curtis Chong witnessed this neglect firsthand in 2001 as a third-year medical student working in an emergency room in Mozambique. Day and night, malaria patients lined up for treatment, but Chongs medication stockpile was often too low or too antiquated to treat drug-resistant strains of the disease, and people were dying.

Six years later, the 31-year-old pharmacologist is spearheading an innovative way to bring better drugs, and more of them, to the developing world.

What do starfish, salamanders, and the Hulk have in common? They all have the power of regeneration. Starfish can regenerate their legs; salamanders can do that and a few better by regrowing their tail, and parts of their heart and eyes. The Hulk, well, the Hulk can regenerate it all. We ordinary humans are not so lucky. If we lose something, it's gone for good, unless, that is, we happen to have a brother working in the field of regenerative medicine.

University of Florida scientists have developed a new gadget that basically annoys patients into taking their prescribed drugs, then tests their breath to ensure that they've actually swallowed the necessary pill. When it's time to take your medication, the machine beeps. Ignore it and it beeps again. In fact, it gets louder and louder until you actually respond—after a predetermined time, if you haven't swallowed your meds, it sends a message to the clinical trial coordinator. The device also performs a breath test that picks up the presence of a chemical tracer.

Perhaps youre the type of health nut who takes four or five different vitamin concoctions each morning to support weight loss, anti-aging, good digestion, clear skin and high energy. Or maybe youre just curious about the medicinal effects of black tea, cranberry juice and licorice. Well, youre in for a treat.

When Rajiv Bhushans father complained of blurry, browned vision and pain from bright lights, doctors told him that surgically replacing his eyes lenses was the only way to correct the cataracts that had left him legally blind. Instead, after learning that cataracts result from an age-related accumulation of proteins and lipids in a persons lens, Bhushan, an electrical engineer, set to work concocting a chemical solution to break up the molecules clouding his fathers eyes.

Six years later, the eyedrops, called C-KAD, are entering the final stages of clinical testing. If all goes well, they will hit pharmacy shelves in two years, becoming the first non-surgical treatment.

So you havent gotten around to donating blood or getting on the bone marrow transplant list or taking a class on CPR. Its time to step up, people. Fortunately for you, you can cross the last one off the list, sort of. The American Heart Association is letting everybody know that even if you arent trained in CPR, jumping in and administering chest compressions if you witness an adult collapse after having a heart attack is more than twice as likely to save his life than just calling 911 alone.

Robotics and surgery continue to intertwine with new research coming out of the Imperial College London. Computer scientists there have been improving upon the already tremendously sophisticated Da Vinci surgical robot. Currently, to operate the machine, a surgeon sits in a console from which she peers into the patient through a fiber optic camera. She manipulates the finely-tuned arms of the device with a set of fingertip controls. What the researchers are adding to the system is an attachment which can track the surgeons eye movements and present a three-dimensional map of the area of the patient at which the surgeon is looking. It does this by combining live imagery with a collection of scans of the patient taken prior to the surgery.

Pop this pill, and eight hours later, doctors can examine a high-resolution video of your intestines for tumors and other problems, thanks to a new spinning camera that captures images in 360 degrees. Developed by the Japanese RF System Lab, the Sayaka endoscope capsule enters clinical trials in the U.S. this month.

We take about six months to create our annual list of the most impressive young scientists in the U.S., six months of quizzing academic department heads, professional organizations and journal editors about the most creative and important research in the country and the individuals making it happen. And every year, those leaders-a serious and measured group-nominate hundreds of candidates with barely contained excitement. "There is no doubt in my mind that his work will revolutionize the field," says one. "He has done something that, frankly, I thought was impossible," says another.

Grace LeClair had just finished eating dinner with friends when she got the phone call every parent dreads. The chaplain at the Medical College of Virginia was on the other end. "Your daughter has been in a serious accident. You should come to Richmond right away." LeClair was in Virginia Beach at the time, a two-hour drive from 20-year-old Bess-Lyn, who was now lying in a coma in a Richmond hospital bed.

The friend who was with Bess-Lyn has since filled in the details of that day in March. The two women were bicycling down a steep hill, headed toward a busy intersection, when Bess-Lyn yelled that her brakes weren't working and she couldn't slow down. Her friend screamed for her to turn into an alley just before the intersection. But Bess-Lyn didn't turn sharply enough and crashed, headfirst, into a concrete wall. She wasn't wearing a helmet. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, Bess-Lyn was officially counted among the 1.5 million Americans who will suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) this year.

Although doctors may someday heal weakened body parts by infusing them with stem cells that develop into specialized tissues, coaxing the body´s own cells to become self-repairing would be an even bigger biological coup. What if we could simply prompt damaged organs to repair themselves?

This January, news that South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk fabricated research on cloned human stem cells brought more negative attention to an already controversial field. Hwang´s work had been believed to be a breakthrough. His technique for cloning embryonic stem cells genetically matched to patients might have been used by scientists worldwide to cure disease.

Brain chips that enable us to control machines with our thoughts. Kidneys and lungs built to order in the lab. Pills to make you smarter and more creative. An implant that gives you a tan and protects against skin cancer. All these innovations are in development; some are already being tested on human subjects.

The next technological frontier will be our own bodies. Genetics, materials science, tissue engineering and nanotechnology are already yielding products to help the sick and injured, including a Band-Aid-like heart patch and the C-leg prosthesis for amputees.

Don’t tell anyone, but Doug Ausenbaugh has built an underground drug farm—in bucolic southern Indiana, no less. It’s cleverly cached in an old limestone mine near the hamlet of Marengo. There, carefully cultivated stalks flourish under the glare of artificial lights and the rainlike spatter of drip irrigation.

When I was a boy, my dad told me that three things are inevitable in our family: death, taxes, and male pattern baldness. Like most sons, I'm forever trying to prove him wrong. That's why, 30 years later, I decided to get a hair transplant.

But not any old hair transplant. Certainly not one like my buddy Brad's -- he wound up with unsightly clumps sprouting from his scalp. Nor one like friend John's, which led to days of suffering: "The anesthesia made my face swell up like Quasimodo," he says.