India’s first wind-pipe transplantation on a cancer patient

In yet another first to its medical credit, the Amrita hospital successfully conducted the initial phase of a complex transplantation process which involved the first-ever windpipe transplantation in India and only the second known instance in the world. The 37-year old female patient suffering from cancer in the trachea (windpipe) was on the verge of losing hope, as she approached the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences. As the team of doctors embarked on the highly complex affair, the one that takes six weeks to complete, the surgical achievement was made possible due to the willingness shown by the donor’s relatives who agreed to donate the organs after the person suffered a brain hemorrhage and was declared brain-dead.

The doctors performed the first windpipe transplant on the cancer patient. The entire transplantation takes six weeks and the complex surgery is done in two phases. In the first phase, the windpipe harvested from the donor is embedded in the recipient’s forearm after stripping it of all cells. After two months, the recipient’s damaged windpipe is transplanted with the one which has been reseeded with his own.

First Indian University to Sign MoU with British Geological Survey

With the larger vision of bringing in the best minds in the world to collaborate for cutting-edge research initiatives, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has signed MoU’s with leading premier research institutions in the world. Most of these initiatives have been driven by compassion to provide the best in class in terms of Medicine, Education, Healthcare, Water, and various other areas. 

To further extend its collaborative initiatives, Amrita signed an MoU with The British Geological Survey (BGS) of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation thereby becoming the first Indian university to sign an MoU with UK’s prestigious national research centre, the BGS. The MoU is intended to develop technical cooperation between Amrita and BGS in the field of landslide monitoring & research. Amrita being a core member of the LANDSLIP consortium, enhances the Indian, UK, and Italian scientists and engineers contributing to the LANDSLIP challenge to contribute to new knowledge and information on landslide risk reduction in India. 

This collaboration has paved the way to sign an MoU with the BGS that will further strengthen the existing alliance between the two institutes and will enhance the strong research bank that is already in place. Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications (AmritaWNA) has been actively pursuing research on landslide monitoring and prediction for more than a decade now. The researchers from AmritaWNA and the BGS have been involved in collaborative research work for the past few years. After a successful and mutually beneficial collaboration, the two institutions stepped forward to sign this MoU in order to develop and reinforce their cooperation in the fields of earth sciences, mineral prospecting, and disaster management. It is also an effort to improve the cooperation between the United Kingdom and the Republic of India through participation in this MOU, with the intent of reinforcing and strengthening scientific links between the two countries.

India’s First Double Organ Transplant

For the 31-year-old man, who was suffering from Type 1 Diabetes and Kidney failure was undergoing a chronic state due to poor control of diabetes. The team of medical professionals conducted the double organ transplant, a novelty in India out of sheer compassion looking at the chronic state of the patient. On diagnosis, the doctors identified that if the kidney alone is transplanted and the diabetes is poorly controlled, then even the transplanted kidney will slowly be affected by the high blood sugar levels. The team of doctors conducted the complicated surgery with the organs transplanted from a 38-year-old brain-dead patient in Kochi.

The main advantage of this combined transplantation is improvement in quality of life and freedom from diabetes-related complications and dialysis. This also avoids frequent blood sugar testing and the occurrence of life-threatening fall in blood sugar levels.

The complicated surgery was performed by the Solid Organ Transplant Surgery team with the cooperation of multiple departments at the AIMS, including Nephrologists, Endocrinologists, Anesthesia, and Critical Care Specialists.

This combined procedure of transplanting both the Kidney and Pancreas in a single surgical operation is particularly effective for patients who have Type 1 Diabetes and chronic renal failure. Following the surgery, his blood sugars are normal on a normal diet and his diabetes has been cured. The Kidney function has also normalised, the doctors said. The main advantage of this combined transplantation is improvement in quality of life and freedom from diabetes-related complications and dialysis. This also avoids frequent blood sugar testing and the occurrence of life-threatening fall in blood sugar levels.

India’s first remote triggered lab in computer science

Many states in the country are yet to fulfill the norms laid down in the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. The figures for laboratories for science-related subjects are dismal. The students lack exposure to laboratory based environments thereby missing the hands-on experience of working on real-time experiments. To bridge this gap, Amrita University has developed a remote triggered virtual lab in computer science, which is an experimental wireless sensor network deployed partly indoors and partly outdoors. The lab will provide students practical experience in designing, deploying, and implementing wireless sensor networks in both indoor and outdoor conditions. Remote users will have a permanent test-bed for the development and testing of concepts. The lab will allow remote users to write their own programs, load and test their programs for learning the impact and the tradeoff between different designs.

The project was funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development. The experiments are developed keeping in mind the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as research scholars. The different concepts we plan to work on include power consumption, transmission range, energy optimization, and data collection. In order to get the feel of a real lab, students will test actual sensors and wireless sensor networks on a remote trigger basis. The interfaces for recording data and performing calculations on the collected data will be provided, to give a real feel of the labs.