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Medical innovation has been crucial to the global response to COVID-19. However, this is not something that has been particularly easy to achieve in countries where resources are scarce and funding low. In locations such as this, frugal design has been providing options in order to strengthen vital medical response.

COVID-19 research has been a vital part of the progress that has been made in combating the virus and bringing its spread under control. Now, investigators from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have taken this a step further by creating a COVID multidimensional dataset that can be shared in real time.

The gender imbalance in biotech recruitment is a topic that is often hotly debated. While women tend to make 80% of all healthcare buying decisions and make up 65% of the healthcare workforce nationwide in the USA, very few women hold positions of power in biotech and healthcare companies. One report found that women hold just 13% of CEO roles in this industry and only 25 - 30% of C-suite roles.

The traditional drug development process has been somewhat thrown on its head following the incredible speed with which the world developed vaccines to combat COVID-19. As a result, there are now calls to disrupt the process of clinical cancer trials in order to bring breakthrough therapies to patients more quickly.

Drug delivery is often inhibited by the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain. However, now a new study may have gained insight into how to 'trick' this part of the body in order to make it easier to treat many of the diseases of the central nervous system. The study was focused on so-called nanoparticle liposome drug carriers, which act like a Trojan Horse, making it simpler to allow drug delivery to the brain without the blood-brain barrier getting in the way. This development could have vital implications for diseases of the nervous system, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Sclerosis. This is one of the first studies to establish that nanoparticle entry to the brain is possible and to show why, when and where it happens. Researchers used two-photon imaging to deconstruct the blood-brain barrier to understand how nanoparticles interact with it. This kind of innovation is only possible through building the kinds of exceptional teams that come from great technology and pharmaceutical research & development recruitment.

Successful biotech recruitment has the potential to change lives by bringing together talented minds with the organizations where innovation can happen. One prime example of this today comes from scientists who have been working on technology that would allow someone who is unable to speak to communicate via text on a screen. Results of the work by Scientists at the University of California were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine and show that tests on a patient with post-stroke anarthria and spastic quadriparesis were successful. The technology at the heart of this is electrocorticography (ECoG), which could be used to pioneer huge leaps forward in motor and speech control for those patients who are affected by a range of different neurological disorders, including ALS. ECoG is hugely innovative, using a subdural, high-density, multielectrode array placed directly on the exposed surface of the brain, and could be totally transformative for many patients' lives.

Clinical trials inclusion and diversity is a topic that has been moving higher up the agenda in recent years. Despite the recent spotlight on the issue, it's actually not a new topic - the U.S. Food and Drug Administration provided its guidance on inclusion and diversity in clinical trials a decade ago. Even so, not a great deal of change has been achieved in that time and some of the outreach options suggested - such as local barbershops - have been seen by many as small scale and, often, insulting. Many patients have also suffered from a lack of face-to-face time with a primary care physician and being unaware of the various options that exist when it comes to clinical trials for certain conditions. Clinical operations recruitment can help to support more inclusion and diversity across clinical trials. Study sites that have a diverse team with members who can use the language of the patients targeted as part of the study could potentially make a big difference.

Hearing aids provide the opportunity for many people to improve the way they experience the world - or that's the theory at least. However, a new study that has focused on analyzing the neural coding of speech sounds has identified an issue that could explain why so many hearing aids end up back in the box. The study found that the sound-processing algorithms that are used by hearing aids can have a negative impact on the wearer when it comes to their ability to discriminate sounds. This isn't the first study that has been focused on why we tend to discard our hearing aids but it could provide an opportunity to tweak hearing aid design so that the technology is much more useful. Rather than patients claiming that their hearing aids simply don't work that well, overcoming the problem that hearing aids don't provide clear and comfortable speech recognition in many of the environments we pass through every day could make the devices much more widely useful.

Diabetics tend to suffer from many different issues, one of which is a problem with breaking bones. In fact, someone with Type 2 diabetes is three times more likely to break one of their bones than someone who doesn't have the condition at all. This is something that has puzzled scientists for years, as people who suffer many broken bones often have low bone density - however, that isn't usually the case with diabetics.

A vast expansion in telehealth services has been one of the key developments in the American healthcare market over the past year. According to figures from research company PitchBook, there has been a huge increase in health businesses offering remote urgent care, virtual primary care and new wearable technologies to monitor patient health. As a result, the annual global telehealth market is forecast to burst through $300 billion by 2026, which is a fivefold increase since 2019.