From the Stoke Sentinel, United Kingdom, ByJenny Amphlett
Business hasn’t always been a piece of cake for Danielle Hyman. While her afternoon tea delivery service now treats guests to an exquisite experience to celebrate weddings, retirements and more, getting it off the ground took some real, digital dedication.
For more than two decades, 50-year-old Danielle from Moseley worked as the manager of her local doctors surgery, where her husband was the GP.
When he fell ill with polycystic kidney disease, Danielle’s work outlook changed.
“There were no compatible transplant donors to help my husband, so we went through the Paired Kidney Exchange,” says Danielle. “I donated my kidney to someone else, and in turn my husband received a kidney.
“It was a turning point for us. I’m quite creative so I knew this was the time to make a change.
“I love baking, and everyone said that I should consider making my afternoon teas for other people. So I gave it a go.
“I wanted to do hotel-style afternoon tea, very minimalist and smart, served on white bone china with crisp, white napkins. So I made a very basic website and some business cards which I left around.
”Even with delicious finger sandwiches, scones and sweet treats on offer, Danielle didn’t hear anything from her initial attempt.
“I was so disheartened. I knew I could offer a great service, but I needed to look professional online.
“I’d heard about the Google Digital Garage on the radio, and popped in when I was passing while shopping in town. The Google trainers were so friendly and knowledgeable, and they soon gave me confidence that I just didn’t have.
”Danielle went to 10 sessions initially, learning social media strategy, how to form a digital marketing plan and more.
“They do one-to-one sessions too, so I’d take what I’d learnt, put it into practice and then go back with more questions! They were always so understanding and helpful, and I’d take them brownies or cakes as a treat!
“They helped me to tidy up my site and to launch my social media pages. I had this idea that I needed to do everything at once - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - and I struggled with that.
“They reassured me that wasn’t the case - that I could just focus on one and get it right - and my skills grew from there.
”Now Danielle has a new, growing social media presence and she’s been getting great reviews online. It’s given her the confidence to further grow her business.
“I set myself up on Google My Business and the team at the Garage even taught me to use Google forms to take orders online - it’s a brilliant tool and it looks so much more professional. I have videos and more on my pages now too.
“It doesn’t matter what level you’re at, going to the Google Garage helps build confidence. You’re dealing with professionals and they help you develop by sharing their expertise for free.
“I met so many people there, of all ages and abilities, and the Google trainers used our real life situations in their practical training.
“I’d encourage anyone to go.”
• The Google Digital Garage is open on 134B New St, Birmingham B2 4NS . Expert coaches are there to answer any questions you have about creating your CV or improving your digital skills.
Genomic medicine, also termed personalized medicine, precision medicine, and stratified medicine, was introduced into medical science with the success of the Human Genome Project about two decades ago. Since then, it has led to groundbreaking advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Precision medicine employs an individual’s unique genetic profile and DNA sequences to determine their susceptibility to disease, the most suitable and individualized treatment for their disease and focused preventive strategies to adopt. This will, in no small way, reduce the number of unnecessary procedures and exposure to unnecessary and potentially toxic drugs administered to patients.
Genomics has led to the development of cutting-edge drug therapies that simplify the treatment of certain diseases. Genomic medicine is associated with high success rates and efficacy at reduced costs to the patients.
Europe is now taking the lead in pushing investments, innovation, and research in this novel field as genomics has advanced the treatment and diagnosis of a number of diseases in this region including cancer, diabetes, and rare metabolic diseases, as stated in a report in Future Medicine.
Precision medicine not only makes healthcare personalized for patients, it saves them a lot of money. It is fast becoming a booming market in the medical field. According to Markets and Markets, the global market for genomic medicine was worth $13.45 billion in 2016 and it is estimated to reach $23.88 billion in 2022.
While genetic testing and biogenetics have been well-established fields in the past in Europe, it has only recently been tapped into for its benefit in therapeutics and advanced diagnosis. For example, the prenatal diagnosis of certain pediatric conditions was developed by the pioneering Department of Pediatrics at the University of Athens in 1976.
The Department of Medical Genetics at the Choremon Research Laboratory of the University of Athens uses modern techniques in genomics for prenatal diagnosis of a number of genetic disorders including Wilson disease, muscular dystrophies, polycystic kidney disease, and rare disorders such as mitochondrial disorders.
Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow is taking steps to become a global leader in genomic medicine. Teaming up with Aridhia, a clinical genetic company in the city, it is developing therapies through genomics for the treatment of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, COPD, and multiple sclerosis.
A number of breakthrough innovations and discoveries in clinical genetics have been made to provide and individualize healthcare in Europe. For example, Jason Chin and Oliver Rackham, finalists at the European Inventor Award 2012, created a method of producing custom-made proteins using DNA sequencing. These procedures have been successfully employed for development of therapies in insulin treatment and cancer treatment.
The European Union (EU) has begun developing policies that will see precision medicine advance healthcare in Europe. It has, since 2010, invested heavily in genomics with a total of €3.2 billion driven into research and innovation in precision medicine. About a third of this investment has been channeled through the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the largest public-private partnership globally in the field of biological sciences.
The IMI was developed by concerted efforts of the EU and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations with the aim of promoting drug research and innovations.
The IMI precision medicine project has produced significant advances in medicine across Europe. In one instance, a project by IMI tagged NEWMEDS (Novel methods leading to new medications in depression and schizophrenia) has revealed the genetic variants in the development of schizophrenia and autism.
Another IMI project revealed, with the help of DNA sequencing, that there are three different subtypes, which previously was unclassified and treated as a single type, ensuring each asthma patient receives individualized treatment based on the asthma subtype they suffer from.
In a novel project, called The Glioma Actively Personalized Vaccine Consortium, researchers, and geneticists from a number of EU countries including Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, the UK, Switzerland, Spain, and Israel are developing a personalized immunotherapy for the treatment of Glioma.
Since 2010 some laws have been adopted by the EU to ensure precision medicine is developed and placed at the center of healthcare in Europe.
Some of these regulations include the Clinical Trail Regulation which promotes the conduct of clinical trials on genomics in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation which ensures precision medicine and the techniques involved are protected under the law, and the In Vitro Diagnostics and Medical Device Legislation which aims to promote legislation in favor of technological and research advancement in precision medicine.
The European Commission launched an initiative “Personalized Medicine 2020 and beyond – Preparing Europe for leading the global way (PerMed)”. This initiative was birthed with strategies to develop awareness and empowerment among stakeholders, integrate information and ICT solutions, encourage clinical research, and shape healthcare around precision medicine.
This has led the Director General of Research and Innovation of the European Commission to begin discussions with researchers and policymakers from all around Europe. These discussions further led to the creation of an International Consortium for Personalized Medicine, or IC PerMed.
The IC PerMed has created plans and strategies to perform its key responsibilities which include;
Infuse precision medicine into basic healthcare
Provide evidence-based treatment options for citizens of the EU
Establish Europe is a major key player in precision medicine
Promote strong research in precision medicine.
According to a 2015 report by the European Alliance for Precision Medicine, more work still needs to be done in tapping from the well of resources that genomics has in store. The report noted that there is currently no screening guideline for Lung cancer, the continent’s number one cause of cancer deaths, further recommending the need for education of patients and wider screening programmes.
The era of precision medicine holds a lot of promise in paving the way for patients to receive effective care and eliminating unnecessary cost and drug adverse effects. However, there are a lot of challenges for this budding field in Europe.
One of such challenges is the management and control of the enormous amount of patient information genomic medicine would make available, a phenomenon termed as a “genomic tsunami” by the European Society of Human Genetics.
In a bid to properly manage the amount of patient data exposed to researchers, scientists, and doctors, the EU launched the IT Future of Medicine to ensure the privacy of patient’s health data and keep personalized medicine truly personal.
Learn more about precision medicine and the future of genomics here.
Kidney Dialysis
From MedicalXpress
Microscope picture of the microfluidic device developed by Manoj Sharma. The horizontal stripe is the microchannel, which measures 0.2 mm across. The six other stripes are optic fibers that capture the fluourescent light and lead it to a spectrometer. The fifteen dots in the middle are micropillars. Credit: Eindhoven University of Technology
Kidney failure makes around two million people worldwide dependent on kidney dialysis to clean their blood. A tube is connected to a blood vessel and the blood is passed along a membrane, with dialysate (dialysis fluid) on the other side. Because the concentration of salts in the blood is higher than in the dialysate, salt passes through the membrane and enters the dialysate. The rate at which this happens depends on the difference in concentration between blood and dialysate. Since the concentration of salts varies widely among different patients, and the concentration in dialysate has the same standard value, the speed is often not ideal. This causes serious side effects, such as heart rhythm disturbance and renal bone disease. It would be better to continuously adjust the concentrations of salts in the dialysate so that they are optimal for the patient. This, however, requires that the concentrations of salts in the dialysate can be monitored live, but there had not been a reliable technique for that to date.
Manoj Kumar Sharma has devised an ingenious solution for this. He developed a micro-system with a centrally positioned microchannel through which dialysate flows. He covered the walls of the microchannel with sensor molecules, which are only fluorescent in the presence of a salt, such as sodium. The more sodium there is in the dialysate, the stronger the fluorescence. To reinforce this effect, he introduced micropillars into the microchannel, resulting in even more surface covered with sensor molecules.
A laser light shines on the microchannel, and activates the fluorescence of the sensor molecules. Sharma captures this fluorescence using glass fibers that he connected to the channel in the micro-system. The light passes through the fibers to a spectrometer for analysis. The laser light, which is of a different wavelength, is first filtered out. Then, based on the measured intensity of the fluorescence, the sodium concentrations can be read out.
It is important to ensure that the sensor molecules are not disturbed by other salts, so that a pure measurement of the concentration of a specific salt is possible. The 'microfluidic sensor system' of approximately 5x2 centimeters built by the Eindhoven researcher is able to measure sodium, the most important salt in the blood, accurately and live. He expects that it will be relatively easy to extend the micro-system with channel sections coated with other 'photo-induced electron transfer' (PET) sensor molecules, which are sensitive to the other essential salts, such as potassium and phosphate.
Sharma thinks that his technique has a very good chance of being used in dialysis machines. The technique is relatively cheap, stable and very accurate. In addition, he expects that the size of his sensor system can be further reduced, to about 1x1 centimeter, facilitating integration into dialysis machines. His technique may also eventually become part of a portable artificial kidney, a solution that will significantly ease the life of kidney patients.
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