With a four-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, a team from Pen State College of Medicine will develop a small, durable ventricular assist device (VAD) designed specifically for young, growing children between the ages of one and 11 years old. Currently, there are no heart pumps approved for long-term use for this age group. The device, called the PSU Child VAD, could provide long-term support for children with heart failure while waiting for a heart transplant, greatly improving quality of life and outcomes.

Described in a study published Dec. 8 in Nature Electronics, BISC includes a single-chip implant, a wearable “relay station,” and the custom software required to operate the system. “Most implantable systems are built around a canister of electronics that occupies enormous volumes of space inside the body,” says Ken Shepard, Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of neurological sciences at Columbia University, who is one of the senior authors on the work and guided the engineering efforts. “Our implant is a single integrated circuit chip that is so thin that it can slide into the space between the brain and the skull, resting on the brain like a piece of wet tissue paper.”

New non-invasive device conforms to the skull and delivers complex sequences of light through bone. Scientists tested the device on mice with neurons that were genetically modified to respond to light. With information transmitted via light, mice learned to discriminate patterns to complete tasks.

Interactions among viruses can help them succeed inside their hosts or impart vulnerabilities that make them easier to treat. Scientists are learning the ways viruses mingle inside the cells they infect, as well as the consequences of their socializing. Although it is debatable whether viruses are living things, they do compete, cooperate and share genome materials that can sometimes alter their responses to antiviral drugs, result in new variants or play a role in virus evolution. A paper today in Nature Ecology & Evolution by UW Medicine scientists looks at the evolution of poliovirus resistance to a promising experimental antiviral drug, pocapavir. While it seemed counterintuitive, the researchers demonstrated that lowering the potency of pocapavir could improve the situation by enhancing the survival of enough susceptible viruses to continue sensitizing the resistant ones.