tranzudao

Collagen is made out of mainly 3 amino acids:(hydroxy)proline, lysine, and glycine. So in theory collagen powder is giving you very high levels of those specific amino acids which would help promote collagen formation. I can’t say I’m familiar with the literature and if there is any data behind that - but thats your reason

I'm a medical student and I have actually been working on some research to re-evaluate how we decide when to do/not do large bone/joint surgeries. Currently, whether to do surgery or not is based on unvalidated questionnaires that basically ask how much pain they are in and how much it affects their daily activities. We basically don't know when to do these large surgeries or not and the few randomized controlled trials have many issues and report data completely different, limiting the usefulness of meta-analyses. Pretty disconcerting, but I hope that this starts to change in the future as the newest group of surgeons realizes that the current standard of care isn't very evidence based at all.

Probably just a college level gen chem class. Pretty accessible, albeit technical, textbook from what I remember of reading it for a course a few years ago.

I think this is an oversimplification. The cornea differs quite a bit from skin histologically. Even if light does stop at the first layer of the cornea - the question is how? The problem typically found with UV wavelengths is opacification of the cornea/lens (cataracts). I have no idea if this is the case for the specific wavelength in the paper - but it’s definitely worth more discussion

The 3d printer was custom built by our lab. They have since commercialized the design and are sold by the company Acrea 3D.

We were using a UV curing epoxy from Amazon, but we stopped because it had biocompatibility issue. Now we just use whatever is cheapest at the hardware store. It isn't hard at all to make the connections because the tubes go straight into the device and then we just epoxy on the outside and that is good enough.

My main contribution was testing the biocompatibility of the resins actually. The original resin was developed by the engineering team and while it worked well, some of the ingredients were extremely cytotoxic (to the point where if someone got it on their skin it would leave a nasty chemical burn). The resin used in the paper was a newer formulation that is completely biocompatible. The last bit of the paper is a quick dose-response assay with live cells.

I’m actually one of the authors. The main thing we are trying to address in microfluidics is he feasibility, which is why we have been focusing on 3D printing as opposed to traditional clean room fabrication techniques because we can make a new design and see if it works in all of like 15 minutes whereas with clean room fabrication it would take closer to weeks. As far as the connections, we talk about those in some of our earlier papers referenced in the article, but it is actually quite simple. Instead of traditional connectors, we just include roughly 1mm diameter output holes where we can epoxy in tubing that has the same width.