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The National Institutes of Health has launched a $1 million Technology Accelerator Challenge (TAC) to spur the design and development of non-invasive, handheld, digital technologies to detect, diagnose, and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact.

Experts believe that tuberculosis, or TB, has been a scourge for humans for some 15,000 years, with the first medical documentation of the disease coming out of India around 1000 B.C.E. Today, the World Health Organization reports that TB is still the leading cause of death worldwide from a single infectious agent, responsible for some 1.5 million fatalities annually.

Medical researchers can now use label-free microscopic techniques to visualize extracellular vesicles, which are associated with cancer.

By adding infrared capability to the ubiquitous, standard optical microscope, researchers hope to bring cancer diagnosis into the digital era. Pairing infrared measurements with high-resolution optical images and machine learning algorithms, the researchers created digital biopsies that closely correlated with traditional pathology techniques and also outperformed state-of-the-art infrared microscopes.

A team of engineers has created an ultra-small, wireless, battery-free device that uses light to record individual neurons so neuroscientists can see how the brain is working.

A new synthetic biology toolkit developed at Northwestern Engineering will help researchers design mammalian cells with new functionalities. The toolkit, called the Composable Mammalian Elements of Transcription (COMET), could result in new therapies for difficult-to-treat diseases, like cancer.

Bioengineers print 3D implants with layered cells destined to become distinct combinations of tissue, like bone and cartilage. The scaffolds degrade over time to leave the natural tissues in place.

In the future, robots could take blood samples, benefiting patients and healthcare workers alike. A team has created a blood-sampling robot that performed as well or better than people, according to the first human clinical trial of an automated blood drawing and testing device.

Bruce Tromberg’s words drew murmurs of recognition from a crowd at the Photonics West conference in San Francisco, US, where he opened a packed Saturday afternoon of talks on entrepreneurship in healthcare photonics.