Engineers developed a way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. Their models could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer.

As mice watched movies, scientists watched their brains to see how vision could be represented reliably. The answer is that consistency in representation is governed by a circuit of inhibitory neurons. Source: The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.

Equipped with a color 3D camera, an inertial measurement sensor, and its own on-board computer, a newly improved robotic cane could offer blind and visually impaired users a new way to navigate indoors. Development of the device was co-funded by NIBIB the NEI. Source: National Eye Institute.

NIBIB-funded researchers are working on an ankle prosthetic that relies on the user’s residual muscles—and the electrical signals that they generate—to help amputees control their posture continuously.

The development and authorization of COVID-19 POC and at-home tests has been remarkable; a process that can often take more than a year took only a few months in many cases. We believe that lessons learned from our experiences with COVID-19 could be leveraged to facilitate a large-scale effort for swift, widespread access to accurate and reliable tests for a variety of diseases. Source: Health Affairs.