Month: May 2020

Researchers from Penn State and Stanford University have developed a 30-minute urine test to measure levels of substances that can contribute to kidney stone formation. The test could help patients to find out if they are prone to developing kidney stones or to monitor their progress in avoiding kidney stone formation through treatment or dietary changes. Kidney stones are accumulations of crystallized substances such as minerals and salts, and the stones can cause pain and blockages in the urinary system.…

As people are starting to return to work, school and a more normal way of life during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, distancing will remain important for the foreseeable future. Companies, governments, and all kinds of organizations are developing or already implementing, policies and procedures to help prevent new outbreaks of the disease. Lopos, a startup with origins at imec and Ghent University in Belgium, is releasing a wearable device that helps to implement social distancing protocols. The Lopos SafeDistance is a wearable…

More than half of all women experience at least one episode of urinary tract infection (UTI) in their lifetime, with men also facing increasing risks of infection as they age. Current detection of UTIs rely on patients reporting symptoms followed by a lab culture of the urine for known bacterial culprits, which typically takes a few days. However, doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics to suppress any suspect cases of UTI before they get the test results, contributing to the increasing…

Pulmotect, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company, has received approval from the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to initiate two COVID-19 Phase-2 clinical trials of its innate immune stimulating drug PUL-042. The Company plans to start accrual within the next week at up to twenty U.S. sites. The trials are for the prevention of infection with SARS-CoV-2 and the prevention of disease progression in patients with early COVID-19 disease. Funding for the trials came from the final closing of the…

Anemia is properly diagnosed using a blood test that measures hemoglobin, but simply looking behind a patient’s eyelid can be a pretty good alternative if you know how red the tissue is supposed to be. Now, a team at Purdue University has developed a technology that lets a clinician use smartphone pictures of the inner eyelid to automatically obtain surprisingly accurate results of blood hemoglobin levels. This capability is expected to soon be fully integrated into an app that will…