An Italian research team, lead by neurologist Paolo Maria Rossini, created the LifeHand, the latest in a long line of robotic prostheses. The team performed microsurgery to attach the hand 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello, who lost much of his left hand in a car accident. Petruzziello apparently mastered the hand in just a few days, and it responded to 95 percent of his mental commands. He claims that he also received incredible sensory feedback from the hand, even registering needle pinpricks.

Several weeks ago, another team reported successful experiments with an artificial hand that provided sensory feedback, but the LifeHand team claims that the experiments with Petruzziello represent the first time a subject has made achieved such complex movements with a prosthetic using only their mind. It's also the longest a subject has worn such a prosthetic; Petruzziello wore the LifeHand for a month. More research is needed, however, before a prosthetic can be tested long-term.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the LifeHand is that it didn't require Petruzziello to learn any new neurological tricks. He simply sends the same sorts of signals to the robotic hand as he sends his right hand, and gets nearly the same result.

The bionic hand controlled by thoughts [Sun via DVICE]

Industrial designer Joanna Hawley decided to challenge the notions that prostheses need be purely functional – or that they should try to mimic biological limbs – by conceiving a prosthesis that is attractive and stylish in its own right:

Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace. Often, they look much like landing gear and make the wearer uncomfortable, self aware, and sometimes depressed. By channeling the Eames' use materials and iconic style, we designed a leg with Steve McQueen in mind. We sought to convey a creative use of positive and negative space, a balance of materials and a reflection of the wearer.

Using the furniture designs of Charles and Ray Eames as an aesthetic model, Hawley and pre-med student Kayhan Haj-Ali-Ahmadi interviewed amputees, met with color specialists from make-up company Sephora, and scanned legs to achieve the proper proportions. The result: an individually tailored limb that does not look like a biological leg, but still meshes quite nicely with the human body, and hope for an aesthetically pleasing cyborg future.

[Eames-inspired Prosthetic Leg] via Yanko Design via William Gibson

The major goal for García and his colleagues was to recreate the way natural bone gradually blends into tendons and soft tissue. García and his then-graduate student Jennifer Phillips describe the necessity of their work in a press release from Georgia Tech:

"One of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine is to have a graded continuous interface, because anatomically that's how the majority of tissues appear and there are studies that strongly suggest that the graded interface provides better integration and load transfer," said Andres Garcia, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ...

"Every organ in our body is made up of complex, heterogeneous structures, so the ability to engineer tissues that more closely mimic these natural architectures is a critical challenge for the next wave of tissue engineering," said [García's then-graduate student Jennifer] Phillips, who is now working at Emory University as a postdoctoral research fellow in developmental biology.

Using gene therapy, the Georgia Tech researchers were able to artificially engineer that elusive bone-soft tissue interface. They started with a 10-mm scaffold of collagen (pictured above); collagen is the primary protein in the connective tissue of mammals. They then coated this collagen scaffold with a gene delivery vehicle that would encode for a protein called Runx2. At one end of the scaffold, they planned for a high concentration of Runx2 — one that would slowly decrease until it reached the other end. They now had a collagen scaffold with a gradually varying coat of Runx2.

After that, they seeded the scaffold with dermal fibroblasts, causing skin cells to sprout uniformly on the Runx2-coated collagen. Skin cells on the area with a high concentration of Runx2 turned into bone, and skin cells at the other end became soft tissue. Voilà — a natural-seeming gradient of bone to tendon was the final result. And they didn't just stop there: García's group went on to implant their collagen scaffold in vivo for several weeks, and successfully.

This technology isn't just useful for building artificial limbs; it could also provide major advances in surgery. The Georgia Tech press release had this to say to anybody with aching knees:

Oftentimes, ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] surgery fails at the point where the ligament meets the bone. But if an artificial bone/ligament construct with these types of graded transitions were implanted, it might lead to more successful outcomes for patients.

As someone whose ACL still frequently complains about a seven-year-old injury, this correspondent salutes García, Phillips, and the rest of the Georgia Tech team.

Engineers create bone that blends into tendons [EurekAlert!]
Engineering graded tissue interfaces [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]