This week on Science Today, we learned how a pediatric surgeon is helping to kick-start innovative projects to bring to clinics in an effort to advance children’s health. Dr. Hanmin Lee of UC San Francisco, says even though technology, biology and medicine go hand-in-hand, advanced devices are not always available to the most vulnerable hospital patients because of insufficient funding.
"We organize the engineering of children’s health symposiums to try to bring all the emerging technologies to the benefit of children’s health."
UCSF is involved in developing many such emerging technologies, including different types of monitoring sensors, artificial organs, and little robots - all to help children with a variety of disabilities for their benefit. And when it comes to vaccinations for kids, we spoke to a UC Berkeley’s Dorian Liepmann about their new pill-sized technology that could lead to painless oral vaccines.
"One of my co-investigators suggested that we could actually put this in a lollipop for children. And so they would just hold it in their mouth until the drug was delivered and then they’d have the rest of the lollipop."
While their needleless technology is still proof of concept, Liepmann says some of the advantages – besides no more needle! – would be that you wouldn’t need to pay trained personnel to administer the shot, which is a huge expense. And an easy and effective vaccine like this could lead to better distribution to Third World countries or to rural areas. Liepmann says their technology still needs to undergo clinical trial, so it could be another 5 to 10 years before it’s available, but it sure sounds promising to us! Hear these and other episodes on Science Today. You can subscribe to iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. I’m Larissa Branin – thanks for listening everyone!
