Atrificial Heart Inspired by Cockroaches

Cockroaches have multi-chambered hearts shaped like tubes that are much more resistant to failure than human hearts. The chambers are organized sequentially, each one pushing blood into the next, until the ideal output pressure is reached in the last chamber. Due to this setup, a single chamber failure in a cockroach heart is not cataclysmic to the organ; It can continue beating, but with less efficiency.
A team of biomedical engineers out of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IITK), have developed a new artificial heart, modeled after this muti-chamber idea. But instead of shaping the heart as a tube, they've created the chambers in a series of concentric spheres like an onion.

New Treatment for Knee Injuries

MIT engineers have built a new tissue scaffold that can stimulate bone and cartilage growth when transplanted into knees and other joints, potentially offering a more effective, less expensive – and painful – option to more conventional therapies.
The scaffold developed by MIT has two layers, one that mimics bone and another that mimics cartilage. When implanted into a joint, the scaffold can stimulate mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow to produce new bone and cartilage.
The researchers demonstrated the scaffold's effectiveness in a 16-week study involving goats. In the study, the scaffold successfully stimulated bone and cartilage growth after being implanted in the goats' knees. Although the technology is still limited to small defects, using scaffolds roughly 8 mm (0.3-inches) in diameter, the scaffold offers a potential new treatment for sports injuries and other cartilage damage, such as arthritis.

Hand Exerciser Helps Arthritis Patients

This "hand fitness trainer" strengthens your muscles and joints, resisting repetitive stress injuries and slowing the progression of osteoarthritis.The device, which was a recipient of the Medical Design Excellence Award, fits over your hand like a glove. As you open up your fingers, the adjustable elastic bands that extend from the palm to your finger tips offer resistance, strengthening the muscles of the hand, wrist, and elbow.

Artificial Blood Vessels

Researchers have developed artificial blood vessels made using a person's own skin cells which could dramatically improve the results of organ transplants.

These new blood vessels are made from a patient's own tissues, which lowers the chance of a harmful immune reaction.

Normally, doctors typically harvest a piece of a vein from a patient to make a bypass called a shunt, but over time, these shunts often fail, forcing doctors to use shunts made with plastics and other synthetic materials that can trigger immune reactions or blood-flow problems.

Researchers led by Cytograft Tissue Engineering of Novato, California, came up with a method for growing replacement vessels using a patient's own cells. They start by harvesting skin cells growing these in a sheet. They then roll up the sheet into the shape of a tube.