Potomac Photonics Supports BU’s Stem Cell Research with 3D Printed Parts

By Mike Adelstein
Category: Company

3D Printed Device for Stem Cell Research.

Digital Manufacturing Leader Potomac Photonics is pleased to announce that it recently completed precision 3D printed parts for Boston University to support their research in stem cells.

Stem cells, which have enormous potential in medical research because of their ability to differentiate

into specialized cells types, may one day provide a renewable source of replacement cells for people that require organ transplants or are suffering from ailments such as Parkinson’s disease, Type I diabetes, and Cardiovascular disease.

According to Boston University Investigators, understanding and controlling stem cell differentiation in vitro is proving to be a major challenge because cells can interact with each other either through direct contact or by cell-secreted factors, and a more controlled cell micro-environment is needed to systematically elucidate the important factors that influence cell behavior.

Utilizing a high-resolution 3D printer, Potomac Photonics fabricated precision stencils to pattern seeded stem cells such that cells are grown in a defined arrangement relative to each other. By preparing various stencils, the BU researchers hope to determine how the relative position of stem cells affect their differentiation efficiency and differentiated progeny.

This work, which was performed within Potomac Photonics’ Educational Manufacturing Initiative, demonstrated another novel way that 3D printing and advanced micromanufacturing technologies are spearheading the development of innovative new applications and products. According to V.P. of Operations Mike Davis, “It fills us with great pride that our advanced manufacturing technologies such as lasers, micro-CNC and 3D printers are being used to promote research and development of new devices that will help improve our quality of life.”

For over 30 years, Potomac Photonics has been a leader in microfabrication and small hole drilling. Potomac’s contract services span prototyping to production, helping clients develop miniature products and bring them to market. Using cutting-edge manufacturing technology, Potomac has been recognized by both commercial and government agencies for innovation in areas such as medical devices, electronics, aerospace, and automotive manufacturing. Potomac’s high-tech facility, located in Lanham, MD, is ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 13485:2003 certified. Visit the website at www.potomac-laser.com

Wastecon 2014: Zero waste to landfill takes more than recycling

Panelists discuss processes and models to reduce landfill consumption and increase energy recovery in the U.S.

Ayasdi Announces Strategic Alliance With Teradata

MENLO PARK, CA, Oct 21, 2014 (Marketwired via COMTEX) -- Ayasdi, the leading provider of accelerated learning software for complex data, today announced a strategic partnership with Teradata Corp. TDC, -0.51% to empower enterprises to rapidly find critical intelligence within their growing datasets. Ayasdi's advanced analytics application will be integrated with the Teradata Unified Data Architecture. Using this integration, healthcare, financial services, energy, retail and life science organizations can quickly discover new insights that increase profit margins, strengthen customer relationships, prevent fraud, mitigate risk and meet regulatory requirements.

Ayasdi's pioneering approach to analyzing complex data sets will augment the capabilities delivered by the Teradata Unified Data Architecture(TM). Ayasdi's breakthrough technology combines topological data analysis with machine learning algorithms, helping firms uncover insights, anomalies or similarities within highly complex data sets with hundreds of thousands of variables.

"The exponential growth of data sets, both in size and complexity, demand new analytics techniques and approaches," said Wayne Boyle, vice president of technology and strategy, Teradata. "Ayasdi provides a unique capability to handle the extreme number of variables that are common in some industries. Their Topological Data Analysis techniques coupled with the high speed parallel processing capabilities of Teradata's Unified Data Architecture will enable analysts to tackle problems that were previously inconceivable."

Teradata's Unified Data Architecture can process any analytic on any data by facilitating the integration of multiple technologies into a cohesive and transparent architecture. A key component of the Unified Data Architecture is the Teradata QueryGrid, which pulls together data from multiple platforms into a single answer set.

"Given Teradata's leadership in big data analytics and innovative customers, we are thrilled to partner with them to address the highly complex use cases they encounter," said Andrew Bowles, vice president of business development at Ayasdi. "Integrating Ayasdi's advanced analytics solution with the Teradata Unified Data Architecture will further enhance customers' investments in Teradata and empower them to extract insights from their data and operationalize their findings."

Ayasdi will be presenting at the Teradata 2014 Partners Expo and Conference, on October 22 from 2:15 PM - 3:00 PM, in Nashville, Tenn. The session is entitled "Analyzing Complex Data with Topological Data Analysis" and will be led by engineering lead Abhishek Gupta.

About Ayasdi Ayasdi is transforming how the world uses data to solve complex problems by automatically discovering and operationalizing insights from complex datasets. Founded in 2008 after a decade of DARPA and NSF funded research at Stanford, Ayasdi has been named as one of the most innovative companies in big data by Fortune, Fast Company and others. The company's advanced analytics solution combines machine learning with Topological Data Analysis (TDA), enabling users to extract subtle, often hidden insights from their data. Funded by Khosla Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, GE Ventures, Citi Ventures, and FLOODGATE, Ayasdi's customers include General Electric, Citigroup, Anadarko, Boehringer Ingelheim, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Mercy, and Mount Sinai Hospital. To learn more, visit www.ayasdi.com or follow us @ayasdi.

Ayasdi helps the world's biggest and most sophisticated organizations discover breakthroughs that change how we all live and work. People who share this passion can view Ayasdi career opportunities here.

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SOURCE: Ayasdi

October 16, 2014 11:00 ET

Bayes Impact Uses Ayasdi's Advanced Analytics to Discover New Breakthroughs in Parkinson's Disease

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Mercy hopes Ayasdi’s big data platform can save $100M and change doctors’ habits

August 26, 2014 6:00 am by Dan Verel

Silicon Valley’s Ayasdi has teamed up with Mercy and its more than 40 hospitals on a new big data effort that seeks to drastically reduce the time needed for improvements in clinical pathways on a number of procedures.

That, in turn, could help the health system reduce costs by improving efficiency, clinical knowledge, outcomes and eventually readmission rates, according to Gurjeet Singh, CEO of Ayasdi, which launched recently but was born out of Stanford University’s Mathematics Department.

While myriad big data efforts are underway throughout the healthcare industry, the Ayasdi Care platform is unique in that the data gleaned from EHRs, along with financial information, can be specifically tailored to individual health systems’ patient data and demographics, Singh said. It can also be put together much faster than it would ordinarily take to implement clinical pathways or best practices, which typically take years.

“It’s all very hypothesis-oriented,” Singh said. “A human being has to come up with the hypothesis, and with the data going the way it is, that’s not a very efficient way to do things. What we have done is developed a platform that sifts through the data and points people in the right direction.”

St. Louis-based Mercy, with its dozens of hospitals and hundreds of clinics and outpatient facilities, expects it can both significantly improve clinical outcomes while saving hundreds of millions of dollars in the near term.

“Ayasdi Care provides an intuitive interface that allows our physicians and staff to understand the ‘why’ behind specific care pathways which makes it easier for them to adopt and adhere to our own best practices,” said Seth Barbanell, MD, VP of Mercy’s Clinical Performance Acceleration.

Singh said Mercy anticipates it could save as much as $100 million over two years.

The speed in processing the data is a key part of achieving those types of savings, Ayasdi CMO Patrick Rogers said.

“It would take them months to come up with a recommended pathway, and we can cut that from months down to weeks or even days,” he said. “That’s very powerful.”

It’s perhaps analogous to how genomic data is comparatively easy to sequence, but requires significant resources to analyze the data and gain insights. If the process can be sped up while maintaining quality data, programs can then be developed that take into account the patterns gleaned from the data.

Also important is the rate of adoption of any new pathways among physicians. Typically, healthcare providers rely on peer-reviewed studies and expert physician knowledge. But that approach relies on consensus, across a limited number of physicians, resulting in greater variation in treatments, which lowers physician adoption, the company said.

“They are expecting a much higher rate of adoption because it’s their own data,” he said.

“The ability to combine the complexity of medical data with recent innovations in machine learning will quicken and deepen the pace of medical innovation,” said Skip Snow, Senior Healthcare Analyst, Forrester Research. “New standards of care will be discovered. Software assisted diagnosis will become commonplace. Discovering new uses for medicines will regularly occur.”

Co-founder and CEO Singh said Ayasdi Care is ideal for large health systems that generate significant amounts of data, and that the company is hoping to replicate its model with Mercy across the industry.

Ayasdi, with about 100 employees, isn’t limited to healthcare, either, having applied its analytics to the pharma, finance and oil industries. It also counts General Electric among its clients. Last year it raised $30 million and has grown by about 4x year-over-year, according to Singh.

If you’ve ever had a bad experience at an internship, you might take some pleasure in hearing this news.

NBCUniversal has agreed to a $6.4 million settlement in a class action suit brought by thousands of former interns.

The interns claim that NBCUniversal violated state and federal labor laws by not paying them minimum wage for the work they did.

Despite settling in the case, NBCUniversal denies any wrongdoing. The average award to a member of the class action will be $505.

NBCUniversal probably settled because of the precedent set in a 2013 decision by a US district judge which compelled Fox Searchlight Pictures to pay two interns who worked on the 2010 movie Black Swan. The judge ruled that their work had risen to the level of regular employees and directly benefitted the production company.

At this point, some of you might be thinking that you would kill to have an unpaid internship working on shows like Saturday Night Live. Internships can provide valuable experience and contacts for aspiring workers in the field. For many students, unpaid internships lead to a full-time job with the employing company in short order.

If settlements like this one spread, it could serve as a major disincentive for companies to run internship programs. Such a development could be devastating for students in an economy where firms are unwilling to hire inexperienced workers. 

Then again, the prominence of unpaid internships also speaks to the disturbing unwillingness of many companies to pay their workers  what they are owed.

Are internships exploitative? Let us know in the comments section below.