They may be tiny, but hummingbirds have a huge memory, say researchers.

London - They may be tiny, but hummingbirds have a huge memory, researchers have found.

Their hippocampus – the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory – is up to five times bigger than that in songbirds, seabirds and woodpeckers.

This might explain why hummingbirds are such skilled foragers.

The birds can remember where every flower in their territory is and how long it takes to refill with nectar after they have fed.

A team led by Dr Andrew Iwaniuk, of the University of Lethbridge in Canada, dissected hummingbird brains and found their hippocampus showed an “exceptional” memory.

Their study is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. - Daily Mail

Its similarity to other bacteria means this deadly new strain has existed until now without being identified.

London - A type of bacteria in the mouth may cause serious disease or even kill if it enters the bloodstream via bleeding gums, scientists warned on Tuesday.

They identified Streptococcus tigurinus for the first time after carrying out tests in which they isolated it from the blood of patients suffering inflammation of the heart, meningitis and inflammation of the spine.

Its similarity to other bacteria means it has existed until now without being identified.

Dr Andrea Zbinden, of the University of Zurich, who led the study, published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Micro-biology, said: “This bacterium seems to have a natural potential to cause severe disease. The next step is to work out how common this bacterium is in the oral cavity.” - Daily Mail

Monkeys suffering from Parkinson's disease show a marked improvement when human embryonic stem cells are implanted in their brains.

Tokyo - Monkeys suffering from Parkinson's disease show a marked improvement when human embryonic stem cells are implanted in their brains, in what a Japanese researcher said on Wednesday was a world first.

A team of scientists transplanted the stem cells into four primates that were suffering from the debilitating disease.

The monkeys all had violent shaking in their limbs - a classic symptom of Parkinson's disease - and were unable to control their bodies, but began to show improvements in their motor control after about three months, Kyoto University associate professor Jun Takahashi told AFP.

About six months after the transplant, the creatures were able to walk around their cages, he said.

Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurological illness linked to a decrease in dopamine production in the brain. There is currently no medical solution to this drop off in a key neurotransmitter.

The condition, which generally affects older people, gained wider public recognition when Hollywood actor Michael J. Fox revealed he was a sufferer.

Takahashi said at the time of the implant about 35 percent of the stem cells had already grown into dopamine neuron cells, with around 10 percent still alive after a year.

He said he wants to improve the effectiveness of the treatment by increasing the survival rate of dopamine neuron cells to 70 percent.

“The challenge before applying it to a clinical study is to raise the number of dopamine neuron cells we can implant and to prevent the development of tumours,” he said.

Takahashi said so far he had used embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from foetuses, but would likely switch to Induced Pluripotent Stem cells, which are created from human skin, for the clinical trial.

Scientists say the use of human embryonic stem cells as a treatment for cancer and other diseases holds great promise, but the process has drawn fire from religious conservatives, among others.

Opponents say harvesting the cells, which have the potential to become any cell in the human body, is unethical because it involves the destruction of an embryo.

The Japanese government currently has no guidelines on the use of human stem cells in clinical research. - Sapa-AFP

Science is “under siege,” top academics and educators have warned.

Vancouver - A stark theme emerged from an annual scientific get-together in Vancouver: the world must be helped to believe in science again or it could be too late to save our planet.

Science is “under siege,” top academics and educators were warned repeatedly at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting as they were urged to better communicate their work to the public.

Scientific solutions are needed to solve global crises - from food and water shortages to environmental destruction - “but the public now does not understand science,” leading US climate change expert and Nasa scientist James Hansen told the meeting.

“We have a planetary emergency, and very few people recognise that.”

The theme of the five-day meeting, attended by about 8,000 scientists from 50 countries, was “Flattening the world: Building a global knowledge society.”

“It's about persuading people to believe in science, at a time when disturbing numbers don't,” said meeting co-chair Andrew Petter, president of Simon Fraser University in this western Canadian city.

Experts wrangled with thorny issues such as censorship, opposition from religious groups in the United States to teaching evolution and climate change, and generally poor education standards.

“We have to plan for a future, considering the risk of climate change, with nine to 10 billion people,” said Hans Rosling, a Swedish public health expert famous for combating scientific ignorance with catchy YouTube videos.

Rosling, pointing to charts showing how human populations changed with technology and how without science the majority of a family's children die, said it is naive to think that humanity can easily go backward in history.

“I get angry when I hear people say: 'In the rainforest people live in ecological balance.' They don't. They die in ecological balance,” he said.

Outgoing AAAS president Nina Fedoroff, a renowned expert on life sciences and biotechnology, said a growing anti-science attitude “probably lies in our own psyche.”

“Belief systems, especially when tinged with fear, are not easily dispersed with facts,” she said, noting that in the United States “fewer people 'believe' in climate change each year.”

Her remarks held particular resonance for the scientific community, coming as US President Barack Obama faces a fierce attack from a potential Republican challenger for the allegedly “phony theology” behind his environmental policy.

“I refer to global warming as not climate science, but political science,” Christian conservative Rick Santorum, who is soaring ahead in the Republican race to take on Obama in November, said at a campaign stop Monday in Ohio.

Skepticism and denial of climate change still run strong in the United States, with polls showing a nation divided on the threat posed by global warming.

During the AAAS meeting, there was a new development abroad in the controversy over whether research by American and Dutch scientists on a mutant form of the bird flu virus - which is potentially capable of spreading in humans - should be made public.

Bird flu experts at the World Health Organisation meeting in Geneva last week agreed that the controversial research should be made public at some time in the future after more risk analysis is done.

In the meantime, a moratorium on further studies has been extended.

Last year, American authorities asked scientists not to publish details of their research for fear the information could fall into the wrong hands and unleash a lethal flu pandemic.

“I would not be in favour of stopping the science,” Fedoroff said in Vancouver. “The more we know about something, the better prepared we are to deal with unexpected outcomes.” - Sapa-AFP

Few can fully imagine the nightmare Peter Skyllberg endured for two months, trapped inside his ice-bound car.

 Few can fully imagine the frozen nightmare that Swedish motorist Peter Skyllberg endured for two months, trapped and slowly dying inside his ice-bound car on a remote track after it became bogged down in snow drifts last December.

As his body temperature plummeted in the Scandinavian winter, he would have fallen ever more deeply into the grip of hypothermia. The condition would have rendered his frozen brain disoriented and prone to hallucinations in the darkness of his snow-sealed vehicle. Thoughts of rescue or escape would have faded as his consciousness slipped away.

And as Skyllberg, 44, lay shivering in his dark, dank tomb in temperatures as low as -30 degrees Centigrade, the air inside the car would have become ever staler as oxygen levels fell.

Curled up in his sleeping bag, his starving body would have started to shut down, muscle by muscle, organ by organ.

Miraculously, however, the freezing temperatures and scarce oxygen may actually have saved Skyllberg’s life. The world watched in astonishment as he was pulled from his car on Friday, emaciated, in a torpid state and barely able to talk - but alive.

The story of Skyllberg’s escape from an icy death follows a series of astounding incidents where men, women and even children have survived conditions so cold that they should, by all accounts, have frozen to death.

But these cases have inspired doctors to investigate how such medical miracles occur, and their discoveries are opening up a freezing frontier of medicine.

For far from being deadly, extreme cold could offer a new way to save the lives of people who have suffered heart attacks and strokes. Some experts believe it may even provide a cure for certain cancers.

The circumstances of Skyllberg’s icy incarceration give us clues as to why he survived his ordeal. When he was found on Friday near the northern town of Umea, just south of the Arctic Circle, he had been snowed into his car since at least December. Although he had no food, he had been able to drink melted snow. As Dr Ulf Segerberg, the chief medical officer at Norrland’s University Hospital in Umea, explains: “Humans can tolerate a month of starvation, so long as they have water to drink.”

But he was also buried deep in snow, and research indicates that conditions inside this freezing, fusty tomb may have set off a “hibernation” response in his body.

Until recently, mainstream medical wisdom has said that the bodies of humans and other primates do not have hibernation mechanisms. But this has been overturned by experiments at Arizona University in a sealed artificial environment called Biosphere 2, which covers the size of 2½ football fields.

Dr Roy Walford has studied what happens to human volunteers living in the Biosphere when the temperature is lowered, the level of oxygen in the atmosphere is reduced and they are deprived of food - conditions mirroring those in Skyllberg’s car.

After several months, Dr Walford found that the volunteers’ blood became better at retaining oxygen, thanks to a drop in levels of a chemical called erythrocyte which releases oxygen into the muscles and organs. Their heart rate and breathing became sluggish, but they did survive the challenging conditions.

When Walford reported the results of the experiment in a scientific publication, Journals of Gerontology, he noted that the changes were characteristic of those found in hibernating animals.

The ultimate evidence for human hibernation comes from the case of a Japanese man, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, who suffered an extreme case of hypothermia after being stranded on a snowy mountain for 24 days in 2006.

Uchikoshi, 35, a Japanese office worker, fell down a snowy slope near the city of Kobe and lost consciousness.

As the temperature on the mountain dropped, his body’s survival instincts kicked in. Dr Shinichi Sato, head of the hospital emergency unit where he was treated, told reporters: ‘He fell into a state similar to hibernation. Many of his organs slowed, but his brain was protected.’

During his 24 days on the mountain, doctors estimated that Uchikoshi’s core temperature had fallen to 22c (as opposed to the normal 37c) but after regaining consciousness in the hospital, Dr Sato reported, Uchikoshi’s brain had made a total recovery.

The miraculous case of Erika Nordby, a chubby-cheeked one-year-old who survived being frozen stiff in 2001, also had doctors scratching their heads. After wandering outside on a bitterly cold Canadian winter night, little Erika was found hours later lying in the snow wearing only a nappy in temperatures of -20 degrees Centigrade.

Even though she was clinically dead - her heart stopped beating for more than two hours - the tot survived. When paramedics arrived, they had trouble putting a tube down her throat because her mouth was frozen shut. Her toes were also frozen together.

But when she was warmed up by an emergency hospital team, a seeming miracle happened: her heart began to beat on its own. Scans showed that her oxygen-starved brain had swelled a little, but doctors say she now shows no evidence of brain damage.

Again, the frozen conditions that could have killed Erika were actually responsible for saving her, by putting her body and brain into suspended animation.

Another extreme case of survival has inspired doctors to investigate whether putting people into a state of suspended animation could help to save them from the effects of strokes, heart attacks or even cancer.

Dr Anna Bagenholm was skiing off-piste in Norway when she crashed through ice into a flooded gully and was trapped underwater for 40 minutes.

When the 29-year-old was finally pulled from under the ice, she was clinically dead. Her heart had stopped for nearly three hours, and efforts to resuscitate her went on for nine hours.

Doctors say that she was saved by the fact that her body’s vital organs had chilled very quickly. Her body temperature had plummeted from 37 to 14 degrees Centigrade. It stopped her heart but protected her brain, because it was so cold that it did not need any oxygen. She has since made a full recovery and continues to ski the very mountains where she cheated death in 1999.

The case inspired Dr Mark Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, to develop a technique known as “hibernation on demand”, which in the near future could be used on humans for medical purposes.

Dr Roth used freezing hydrogen sulphide gas to place mice into a state of artificial hibernation, slowing their cellular activity virtually to a standstill. Their bodies responded by radically slowing their metabolisms. The animals were left in this state for up to six hours before being revived without any lasting ill effects.

The research could improve cancer therapies. Slowing the body would give doctors longer to identify and treat fast-growing cancer cells. The technique could also buy time when treating severe blood loss, fevers, heart attacks and strokes.

It even raises the prospect of putting astronauts into suspended animation for voyages lasting many years into deep space, as predicted by science-fiction films such as Alien.

But this isn’t just the stuff of science fiction. Body-cooling techniques are being used in pioneering hospitals around the world.

Doctors are already using induced hypothermia to protect the brains of people who have suffered heart attacks, because it slows down their activity levels. One study by doctors in Mississippi claims that it can increase the survival rate by up to five times.

And Dutch doctors in Nijmegen, are now using induced hypothermia for patients who have suffered brain injuries in accidents. It may even help to save the brains of babies who are born suffering from severe epileptic fits, according to neonatal doctors working in Florence.

Peter Skyllberg in his frozen car, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi on his snowy mountain side, Anna Bagenholm crashing through the ice, and little Erika Nordby lost in the snow have perhaps inspired astonishing medical breakthroughs which now hold hope for thousands. - Daily Mail

Research suggests that education changes anti-science attitudes among even the most religious of students.

Vancouver - A perceived conflict between science and religion has led Americans to rank nearly last among industrialised countries in understanding evolution, educators told a major science conference this weekend.

But research suggests that education changes anti-science attitudes among even the most religious of students, while history shows that science can thrive alongside religion, said Kenneth Miller of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Evolution is exhibit A on the cutting edge of the anti-science movement in the US,” Miller told a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He said the United States placed second to last - just before Turkey - in a recent survey in 33 countries of how well people understood evolution.

Widespread rejection in America of climate science, and denial of climate change is linked with the “street fight” over evolution, speakers told an audience of mostly American scientists and educators.

But Miller said the stereotype that “rational science is at war with irrational faith” is wrong.

He said popular American culture and religious speakers promote a literal interpretation of the Bible, as well as the idea that morality would not exist without religion.

Research shows the perception of religion and science by undergraduate college students who take science courses, even among religious fundamentalists, changes over the years.

“As juniors, they see a conflict between religion and science, and take the religious side,” said Miller. “By their senior year, 79 percent said they don't see a conflict, but a collaboration model instead.”

“These students changed their attitudes and (came to) regard religion and science as being able to exist side by side.”

Miller said he tells his students that some of the most significant scientific breakthroughs were made by religious people, including Augustinian friar Gregor Johann Mendel, the Austrian scientist considered the father of genetics, and Catholic Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaitre, whose mathematic models are the basis for the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe.

“Effective education can increase the acceptance of science, but not by bashing religion,” he added.

The five-day AAAS annual meeting, one of the world's largest scientific gatherings, wraps up Monday in this western Canadian city. - Sapa-AFP

The world's first “test-tube” meat, a hamburger made from a cow's stem cells, will be produced later this year.

Vancouver - The world's first “test-tube” meat, a hamburger made from a cow's stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.

Post's aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.

The ingredients for his first burger are “still in a laboratory phase,” he said, but by fall “we have committed ourselves to make a couple of thousand of small tissues, and then assemble them into a hamburger.”

Post, chair of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said his project is funded with 250,000 euros from an anonymous private investor motivated by “care for the environment, food for the world, and interest in life-transforming technologies.”

Post spoke at a symposium titled “The Next Agricultural Revolution” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Speakers said they aim to develop such “meat” products for mass consumption to reduce the environmental and health costs of conventional food production.

Conventional meat and dairy production requires more land, water, plants and disposal of waste products than almost all other human foods, they said.

The global demand for meat is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, said American scientist Nicholas Genovese, who organised the symposium.

“But the majority of earth's pasture lands are already in use,” he said, so conventional livestock producers can only meet the booming demand by further expansion into nature.

The result would be lost biodiversity, more greenhouse and other gases, and an increase in disease, he said.

In 2010 a report by the United Nations Environment Program called for a global vegetarian diet.

“Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing global catastrophe,” Patrick Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine told reporters.

“More to the point, it's incredibly ready to topple ... it's inefficient technology that hasn't changed fundamentally for millennia,” he said.

“There's been a blind spot in the science and technology community (of livestock production) as an easy target.”

Brown, who said he is funded by an American venture capital firm and has two start-ups in California, said he will devote the rest of his life to develop products that mimic meat but are made entirely from vegetable sources.

He is working “to develop and commercialise a product that can compete head on with meat and dairy products based on taste and value for the mainstream consumer, for people who are hard-core meat and cheese lovers who can't imagine ever giving that up, but could be persuaded if they had a product with all taste and value.”

Brown said developing meat from animal cells in a laboratory will still have a high environmental cost, and so he said he will rely only on plant sources.

Both scientists said no companies in the existing meat industry have expressed interest. - Sapa-AFP

We may not be at too much risk in most parts of SA, but there are those like Peter Agre who tell us we still have to be worried – very worried.

Every 30 seconds, a child dies of malaria – that is the sobering fact coming from the World Health Organisation.

We may not be at too much risk in most parts of SA, but there are those like Peter Agre, director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Maryland, US, who tell us we still have to be worried – very worried.

“There are more people infected with malaria now than ever before,” he says. “We know how to handle it, but the fear is the resistance to current drugs of choice, may spread.”

Agre was a guest speaker at the Mandela School of Medicine this week where he spoke of the pressing work that still needs to be done in Africa.

It was in 2003 that Agre won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of aquaporins, the pumping system and water channels contained in cell membranes.

“It wasn’t something I had set out to do,” he explains. “As a blood specialist my interest was studying malaria in red blood cells. But scientists will always tell you that while research takes you in one direction, your work sometimes leads you elsewhere.”

Agre says that where he left off, many other scientists have continued aquaporin research in the development of new drugs.

“When I had done as much as I could on the initial aquaporin front, malaria became my major focus.”

Although he spends a third of his year in regions where malaria is endemic – mostly Zimbabwe and rural Zambia – he has never had the disease himself.

“I am very careful, always sleep under nets and take the appropriate drugs. Even here in South Africa I hear people say malaria is no longer a threat. South Africa has done very well in its eradication programmes, but vigilance is not the only factor.”

The Anopheles vector mosquito, the main carrier, he explains, is a past master at developing resistance.

“We are seeing the devastating results everywhere. I don’t say we’re staring at defeat, but there is certainly no sign of victory.”

Globally, malaria infects 300 million to 500 million people and kills more than one million every year, according to the World Health Organisation.

“Those are huge figures. That is why we are encouraging young scientists to come on board. We need fresh approaches.

“Like everyone else I used to take chloroquine to prevent malaria. It was a very good drug. But within a decade resistance has emerged across the planet.”

He says it is no longer useful for the most common malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

“We have new drugs, but the risk of resistance is still present.”

While he believes that a malaria vaccine is a possibility, he cannot suggest a time line to it.

“It would be nice if a vaccine emerged in the next year but I don’t think we’re close. This is not a simple virus or a bacterium; this is a complex parasite, and vaccines for parasites have not been successful generally.

“The tragedy is the number of young children who contract malaria. We know that people who have had repeated bouts can develop partial immunity, but young children don’t have time to build up that immunity, which is why the death rate is so high.”

Malaria, says Agre, is perhaps even tougher to combat than HIV or TB because of its many life-cycle stages. The genetic complexity allows the parasites to adapt rapidly to drugs and to the immune system’s efforts to make it ineffective.

With billions of parasites circulating in a single human host, one infected person can transmit to hundreds of others within months, far outstripping the infectiousness of HIV or TB.

He said that while the prevalence of malaria in some parts of Zambia had been reduced by 98 percent because of interventions, other areas were not doing well.

“We’re starting a field station in eastern Zimbabwe, where malaria was once well-controlled. Today that is not the case. Eighty percent of clinic visits are due to malaria. It is out of control.”

Back in the US, Agre’s research team at the John Hopkins lab are looking at a number of ways to block the parasite transmission from mosquito to man and from man to mosquito.

A genetically-modified mosquito whose parasite transmission has been compromised is just one of those investigative avenues. So too, are the mosquito aquaporins, where Agre’s journey of discovery first began, and their role in parasite transmission.

“Our team members are a bit like medical Indiana Joneses. It’s not straightforward. It’s adventurous. Even fun.”

His big wish is that actor George Clooney would become an ambassador for malaria awareness.

“While in the Sudan Clooney got it for the second time. He said he recovered because he was able to get modern medicines that others don’t have, but they should. That was a powerful statement, and so accurate.”

l Peter Agre was hosted in SA by the Vice Chancellor of UKZN Malegapuru Makgoba and KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute into TB and HIV.

Efforts in SA:

According to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in SA, December and January are the malaria season in Southern Africa, with many travellers exposed during holidays, particularly in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Drug-resistant malaria strains, says the institute, are an increasing problem globally, with drugs like chloroquine and Fansidar now largely ineffective.

An artemesinin-based combination drug, Coartem, is described as “a state-of-the-art treatment” and first choice for uncomplicated malaria in the public malaria programmes in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal.

SA’s malaria programmes have reduced the malaria risk in SA, with reported cases decreasing from 60 000 in 2000 to an average of 7 000 cases annually. - Sunday Tribune

Taking vitamin D supplements to safeguard against diseases and some forms of cancer, could be causing more harm than good, according to a study.

Johannesburg - Certain people who take vitamin D supplements to safeguard against diseases and some forms of cancer, could be causing more harm than good, Beeld reported on Friday.

Dr Liza Bornman of the University of Johannesburg's biochemistry department said during a conference on radiation hosted by the Cancer Association of SA that she and her colleagues had conducted their own study.

The researchers examined the ability of vitamin D to repair DNA, and found that in some cases, it lowered the body's ability to fight disease.

Bornman said preliminary results indicated that high levels of vitamin D might impact negatively on the immune system, but not everybody who took part in the study was affected in the same way.

“For now, we have to study the genetic composition of the South African population before anyone takes a clinical standpoint about vitamin D supplements.

“Meanwhile, people who take supplements should probably monitor their vitamin D levels,” Bornman said. - Sapa

A new implantable device could be used for different types of injectable drugs where getting people to take their medications regularly is a problem.

Chicago - An implantable, wireless microchip delivered osteoporosis medicine to a small group of Danish women, raising hope for a new kind of drug delivery device that might allow patients to skip regular injections, US researchers said on Thursday.

The device, now being developed by privately held Microchips, has a wireless receiver that signals the microchip to release the drug.

“Until now, you never had any way you could do this,” said Dr. Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, who helped to develop the technology and is a board member of Microchips.

Langer said the device could be used for different types of injectable drugs where getting people to take their medications regularly is a problem.

That is often the case in patients with severe osteoporosis, who tend to skip doses of their medications because they cannot tell whether or not the injections are affecting the density of their bones.

That is something the microchip was designed to overcome, said Robert Farra of Massachusetts-based Microchips, which paid for the study. Farra, Langer and colleagues published a paper on the study in Science Translational Medicine.

Instead of constantly releasing small amounts of drug, like most drug-delivery systems, the microchip releases medication on command all at once, much like an injection would.

It can be activated by telephone or computer using a special radiofrequency reserved for medical use to safeguard against accidental release of the drug, Langer said.

The microchip itself is a thin wafer, about the size of a small coin, made with tiny wells that hold concentrated doses of medication. These doses are covered with a layer of gold nanoparticles, which dissolve when exposed to a certain radiofrequency. The wafer is implanted under the skin with a receiver device that is roughly the size of a heart pacemaker, Langer said.

In the system's first test in people, the team implanted the device in eight Danish women aged 65 to 70 with a severe form of osteoporosis which required injections of Eli Lilly & Co's hormone treatment teriparatide.

The researchers sent daily signals to the microchip device to release the drug for up to 20 doses. Then, they followed up with a period in which the women took hormone injections.

As seen in animal studies, a fibrous collagen-based membrane developed around the device, but the drug still performed just as well as daily injections in the women, improving bone formation and reducing the risk of fractures, the researchers said.

Still, there were some hitches.

John Watson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego, said in an editorial the device failed to work in one of the patients, and that data was not included in the analysis.

And the team had some manufacturing issues and was able to manufacture only one device with all 20 reservoirs filled with the study drug. Even so, all doses in the microchips were released in the patients, a sign that the device could work in people, Watson said.

“Several years are still needed to bring this technology to approval by the US Food and Drug Administration and to the clinical promise reflected in this small study,” Watson wrote.

The current device holds only 20 doses, but Langer said the group is working on adding more doses to the device.

The company hopes to have a version of the device on the market in five years. Langer said he sees potential for other uses, such as treating diabetes or delivering cancer drugs. - Reuters