[ad_1]
Johns injects less than a tenth of a tablespoon of a mixture of silk and hyaluronic acid through a special catheter connected to his endoscope. He keeps the patient awake because of the injections, sitting upright in that feather chair. The procedure takes about two minutes. Like other vocal fold injections, the results appear immediately. The room enlarges the tissue, strengthens the anatomy until healthy tissue grows back and takes over. “These people are very happy,” Johns says. “These are the kind of life-changing procedures for them.”
The research with Johns will take about two years, but SilkVoice is already licensed for human use. So far, says Hoang-Lindsay, the majority of the 40 people who received the injections have maintained improvements.
Meanwhile, located in Boston A startup called Mori has quietly marketed silk as a way to protect food.
In 2014 as a postdoc of materials engineering in Omenetto’s lab, Benedetto Marelli accidentally invented a food waste repair. “We were doing a silk cooking contest in the lab where we had to do silk cooking,” says Marelli. The strawberry was planned to be incorporated into regenerated silk by silkworms, as if it were pure fondue. The result was poor. He lost the competition, put the strawberries aside and forgot about them. A week later, half was completely rotten. The others still looked fresh. The silk protein created a thin layer that fit the surface of the fruit. Marelli said the water stayed there and the oxygen was left out. Bacteria digest silk too slowly to contaminate the products buried underneath.
Based on this idea, in 2016 Marelli launched Cambridge Crops, now known as Mori, to cover food waste and correct perishables to correct insecurity so that they can last longer. “I like to use the example of zucchini noodles,” says Mori CEO and co-founder Adam Behrens. Unlike wax, Mori’s coating can stick to watery and porous surfaces, just like the outside and inside of a zucchini.
The company integrates spray coating — or Immersion coating, like Marelli’s fortunate accident — directly into food washing and packaging processes. Green leaves and cherries, for example, often undergo cleaning cycles before reaching outlets. (Marelli, now an associate professor of civil engineering and the environment, remains an advisor and shareholder, but has strayed from their operations.)
Last year, a team of allergists, toxicologists and nutritionists called the coverage “generally safe,” meaning people can buy and eat it. Mori already has pilots on U.S. farm and food companies and is expected to begin large-scale manufacturing later this year.
These startups are far from the only ones that focus on the silk silk center. Vaxess, another derivative of Tufts, makes disposable silk micro-needle patches for vaccination. Their patch stores sensitive vaccine antigens at the tiny tips of silk micro-needles, and can work with conventional vaccines already approved by the FDA. According to Kluge, they aim to make vaccines that are stable on shelves that are easier to spread. The Gates Foundation was in favor of some animal testing, and Kluge says Phase 1 human safety studies should begin early next year. (Omenetto and Kaplan are co-founders of Vaxess, Mori and Sofregen.)
While the silkworms grew Every year nine Eiffel Towers can throw cones, scientists have not given up trying to get the same thing from other creatures. “Spider silk is stronger than silkworm, and it’s more elastic,” says Lewis, a former biologist at the University of Wyoming who adopted the BioSteel goat herd. (He is now in the state of Utah.)
But spiders are still in doubt. So Lewis has been looking for a solution for decades. In the late 1980s, he made inquiries for a company that invented a way to assemble proteins (new proteins) that repeat long chains of amino acids. He was asked if he could use this to make spider silk. “The problem was that there was literally no protein information in the spider silk,” Lewis says.
[ad_2]
Source link
