BBC Medical Science — A
prototype artificial skin used to heal wounds has been developed by
British researchers. Writing in the journal Regenerative Medicine,
UK-based company Intercytex said it had produced promising results in
early trials.

It said the skin seemed to incorporate itself much better with real
tissue than any other skin substitutes tried in the past. The
researchers hope it might provide an alternative to skin grafts.

Currently the best way of treating serious burns and large wounds is to
take skin from part of a patient’s body and graft it on to the damaged
area. But this is not ideal, and there have been attempts to create a
form of artificial skin. However, some doctors say that the failure of
these to fully integrate with the wound have rendered these efforts of
limited value.

Intercytex believes its latest version weaves into wounds much better.
The skin is created from a matrix made up of fibrin, a protein found in
healing wounds. To this is added human fibroblasts – cells used by the
body to synthesise new tissue.

In a process that effectively replicates the way the body makes new
skin, the cells produce and release another protein, collagen, which
makes the matrix more stable. It is in this form that the “skin” is
implanted into a wound.

The researchers say that because the matrix is in a stable form, it is
more able to withstand changes that take place during the healing
process. The fact that the collagen is synthesised directly by the
cells themselves also more closely mirrors the natural healing process.

In tests researchers cut an oval section of skin from the arms of six
healthy volunteers and replaced it with their lab-grown skin. After 28
days the artificial skin had remained stable and the wounds had healed
with relatively little scarring. Dr Paul Kemp, Intercytex’s chief
scientist, said: “I was very surprised at how quickly the wounds
healed. (06/27/07)
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BBC Technology –
The world’s fastest commercial supercomputer has been launched by
computer giant IBM. Blue Gene/P is three times more potent than the
current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM. The latest
number cruncher is capable of operating at so called
“petaflop” speeds – the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per
second.

Approximately 100,000 times more powerful than a PC, the first machine
has been bought by the US government. It will be installed at the
Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois
later this year.

Two further machines are planned for US laboratories and a fourth has
been bought by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council for its
Daresbury Laboratory Cheshire.

The ultra powerful machines will be used for complex simulations to study everything from particle physics to nanotechnology.

Currently the most powerful machine is Blue Gene/L, housed at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Used to ensure
that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and
reliable, it has achieved 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations
per second. The machine packs 131,072 processors and is theoretically
capable of reaching 367 teraflops.

By comparison the standard one petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with
294,912-processors connected by a high-speed, optical network. However,
it can be expanded to pack 884,736 processors, a configuration
that would allow the machine to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per
second (three petaflops). “Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most
powerful supercomputing
platform the world has ever known,” said Dave Turek, vice president of
deep computing, IBM. (06/27/07)
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