(Press-News.org) Americans spend over $10 billion a year on products and surgery in their quest to find a "fountain of youth," with little permanent success. Botulinum toxin -- notably Botox -- which smoothes lines and wrinkles to rejuvenate the aging face has been the number one nonsurgical procedure in the U.S. since 2000. But injections of this toxic bacterium are only a temporary solution and carry many risks, some neurological.
A team of Tel Aviv University and Harvard Medical School researchers has now devised a non-invasive technique that harnesses pulsed electric fields to generate new skin tissue growth. According to their research, the novel non-invasive tissue stimulation technique, utilizing microsecond-pulsed, high-voltage, non-thermal electric fields, produces scarless skin rejuvenation and may revolutionize the treatment of degenerative skin diseases.
The study, published recently in Scientific Reports, was led by Dr. Alexander Golberg of TAU's Porter School of Environmental Studies and the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Shriners Burns Hospital in Boston, in collaboration with Dr. William J. Austen, Jr. from the Department of Plastic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Martin L. Yarmush at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Shriners Burns Hospital in Boston, along with other prominent researchers.
An (effective) shock to the system
"Pulsed electrical field technology has many advantages, which have already proved effective -- for example, in food preservation, tumor removal, and wound disinfection," said Dr. Golberg. "Our new application may jumpstart the secretion of new collagen and capillaries in problematic skin areas. Considering that, in the modern era of aging populations and climate change, degenerative skin diseases affect one in three adults over the age of 60, this has the potential to be an healthcare gamechanger."
Current therapies to rejuvenate skin use various physical and chemical methods to affect cells and the extracellular matrix, but they induce unsightly scarring. Pulsed electric fields, however, affect only the cell membrane itself, preserving the extracellular matrix architecture and releasing multiple growth factors to spark new cell and tissue growth. By inducing nanoscale defects on the cell membranes, electric fields cause the death of a small number of cells in affected areas. The released growth factors increase the metabolism of the remaining cells, generating new tissue.
"We have identified in rats the specific pulsed electric field parameters that lead to prominent proliferation of the epidermis, formation of microvasculature, and secretion of new collagen at treated areas without scarring," said Dr. Golberg. "Our results suggest that pulsed electric fields can improve skin function and potentially serve as a novel non-invasive skin therapy for multiple degenerative skin diseases."
The researchers are currently developing a low-cost device for use in clinical trials in order to test the safety and efficacy of the technology in humans.
INFORMATION:
American Friends of Tel Aviv University supports Israel's most influential, most comprehensive, and most sought-after center of higher learning, Tel Aviv University (TAU). US News & World Report's Best Global Universities Rankings rate TAU as #148 in the world, and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings rank TAU Israel's top university. It is one of a handful of elite international universities rated as the best producers of successful startups, and TAU alumni rank #9 in the world for the amount of venture capital they attract.
A leader in the pan-disciplinary approach to education, TAU is internationally recognized for the scope and groundbreaking nature of its research and scholarship -- attracting world-class faculty and consistently producing cutting-edge work with profound implications for the future.
BEER-SHEVA, Israel June 30, 2015 -- Older adults are using online communities to dish about the joys of sex and swap advice about keeping their mojos working, a new study by a Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researcher (BGU) has found.
"Websites geared toward older adults are providing this population with new opportunities to discuss and explore its sexuality," according to BGU's Dr. Galit Nimrod and Dr. Liza Berdychevsky of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I).
According to their paper published online in the Journal of Leisure Research, senior ...
Scientists behind the first global distribution maps of two species of dengue and chikungunya-carrying mosquitoes warn they are spreading to new areas where they could cause disease.
The population of the tiger mosquito, which is known to carry dengue and chikungunya, has rapidly expanded in parts of the US, Southern Europe and China over the past 10-15 years. A new study by scientists at Oxford University reports the growth and identifies areas not yet populated by the insects that are suitable for their survival, for example in Europe. The findings are published in ...
A new study published today in Nature Climate Change has found analyses of carbon emissions may be misleading as they failed to include the impacts of policies such as trading schemes, emission caps or quotas.
"The inclusion of policy mechanisms can radically alter the outcomes from life-cycle analyses and result in counter-intuitive outcomes," said Associate Professor Andrew Macintosh from The Australian National University (ANU) College of Law, lead author of the study.
"Traditional life-cycle analysis would find a person who regularly eats beef and builds their ...
It remains unclear whether a special ophthalmological examination of all children younger than 6 years (and potential follow-up treatments) would reduce the frequency and severity of visual impairment (amblyopia) in the population. An update search conducted for a benefit assessment of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) from 2008 identified no new screening study. No benefit of vision screening in preschool-aged children could be derived from the only new treatment study. This is the finding of a rapid report prepared by IQWiG on behalf ...
Scientists have discovered a new inherited form of obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans.
A large number of genes are involved in regulating body weight, and there are now over 30 genes known in which people with harmful changes in DNA sequence become extremely overweight. Similarly, there are a number of genes that can, when altered, cause type 2 diabetes. These conditions are inherited through families in exactly the same way as disorders such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease.
It is unclear what proportion of severe obesity and type 2 diabetes is caused ...
Geoscientists at the University of Liverpool have used friction experiments to investigate the processes of fault slip.
Fault slip occurs in many natural environments - including during earthquakes - when large stress build-ups are rapidly released as two sliding tectonic plates grinds together. In this process a large amount of the energy released can be converted to heat, that leads to frictional melting.
Frictional melts, when cooled, preserve in the rock-record as pseudotachylytes; but their influence is much greater than just this.
As Professor Lavallée ...
Scientists at the University of Sussex in the UK have unraveled a key process in the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), potentially paving the way for new antibiotics to fight the disease.
TB is one of the world's top infectious killers, causing 1.5 million deaths every year. The TB bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is estimated to be present in up to a third of the world's population, although active TB only develops in around one in 10 cases.
While TB is curable, antibiotic resistance is on the rise and so a major challenge for scientists is to continually ...
A pair of paleobiologists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego have determined that the world's most numerous and diverse vertebrates ¬- ray-finned fishes - began their ecological dominance of the oceans 66 million years ago, aided by the mass extinction event that killed off dinosaurs.
Scripps graduate student Elizabeth Sibert and Professor Richard Norris analyzed the microscopic teeth of fishes found in sediment cores around the world and found that the abundance of ray-finned fish teeth began to explode in the aftermath of the mass die-off of ...
Using the nation's weather radar network, two University of Oklahoma doctoral students have developed a technique for forecasting something other than the weather: the orientation behavior of birds as they migrate through the atmosphere at night. The students have discovered a way to use the latest dual-polarization radar upgrade to measure broad-scale flight orientation of nocturnal migrant birds--a promising development for biologists and bird enthusiasts.
The approach to the problem paired Phillip M. Stepanian, a meteorology and electrical engineering student, and ...
A team of researchers led by UCLA electrical engineers has demonstrated a new way to harness light particles, or photons, that are connected to each other and act in unison no matter how far apart they are -- a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
In previous studies, photons have typically been entangled by one dimension of their quantum properties -- usually the direction of their polarization.
In the new study, researchers demonstrated that they could slice up and entangle each photon pair into multiple dimensions using quantum properties such as the photons' ...
