Diabetes Project Addresses Safe Fasting During Ramadan
Specialist diabetes care company MyWay Digital Health has produced ‘Diabetes and Ramadan’ in response to the increased risk of serious health complications faced by Muslim people with diabetes who wish to fast.
Many of these complications, which include low blood sugar, diabetic ketoacidosis and dehydration, can be mitigated by good self-management, awareness of the risks around fasting and diet and adjusting medication. However, many patients lack understanding of these issues and healthcare professionals can fail to appreciate how Ramadan impacts on people with diabetes.
MyWay, a spin-out from the University of Dundee, ran a pilot of the project prior to Ramadan 2022 with both patients and healthcare professionals reporting benefits and have since provided resources such as on-line courses, self-directed online content and live Q&A sessions in English, Arabic and Malay.
The company grew out of the My Diabetes My Way (MDMW) app developed by Drs Scott Cunningham and Debbie Wake at the University of Dundee to enable diabetes patients to manage their condition. The dual Diabetes and Ramadan courses were developed in partnership with Diabetes and Ramadan International Alliance, a non-profit venture that aims to reduce health inequalities through access to healthcare information.
Scott Cunningham and Debbie Wake (Credit: University of Dundee)
Other collaborators include: the University of Edinburgh (where Dr Wake now works), the University of Putra Malaysia, the British Islamic Medical Association (BIMA) and multiple UK health boards.
Dr Salman Waqar, President of BIMA, said, “The holy month of Ramadan is extremely important to Muslims around the world. It is a month of much benefit but for some people, such as those with diabetes, there are obstacles to navigate.
“It is not only patients who may not know how to best adapt. Doctors, nurses, and other health professionals may not understand all the issues around Ramadan, especially in a country like the UK where Muslims form a minority and professionals may not have been taught this in their training. Put all together, this can lead to inequalities in how Muslims with diabetes experience healthcare.
That is why we were delighted to work with MyWay Digital Health on this project and to help address disparities.”
Launched in 2008 MDMW now has over 62,000 registrants across Scotland and the MyWay Digital health spinout is expanding to develop the service for use in healthcare systems in other countries.
With most of the knowledge surrounding diabetes accumulated from studying white populations with Western European ancestry, the University of Dundee is deeply involved in efforts to address the resulting global health inequalities. In one example, researchers from its School of Medicine identified distinct forms of type 2 diabetes in South Asians, a development with important implications for prognosis and management of the disease.
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Insights from Prominent Scientists on Advancements in 3D Organoid Culture Research
Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), were the two experts interviewed.
During this insightful interview, the experts discussed a range of topics such as their journey into 3D organoid culture research, their experiences in the field and how it has evolved, the obstacles they faced as female researchers, their present research interests, and valuable advice for aspiring women scientists.
Dr Meritxell Huch and Dr Hynda Kleinman.
Advanced tools for organoid growth, harvesting and storage.
To commemorate International Women’s Day on 8th March, as well as World Organoid Research Day on 22nd March, AMSBIO conducted interviews with two remarkable women in the 3D Cell Culture and Organoid field. Dr Hynda Kleinman, a co-inventor of Matrigel, and Dr Meritxell Huch, a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell
Asked ‘If there’s one thing you would like other scientists to understand about your area of research’, Dr Kleinman said: “Organoids have huge potential for studying genes, factors, or drugs for diagnostics and therapeutics as well as for tissue engineering / repair / regeneration either as delivery systems or tissue replacement. Try anything!”
When asked about her current research in the organoid space, Dr Huch answered “What I love is looking through the microscope and seeing these amazing multicellular structures form and develop. I still find it fascinating that we can take a
piece of tissue and expand it for months in a dish while still retaining its identity. This really broke the long-held belief that primary epithelial cells could not be expanded.”
Organoids are 3D cell cultures that mimic the structure and function of organs, achieved by differentiating stem cells or organ progenitors. These structures have attracted significant research attention due to their ability to replicate organ function in vitro. AMSBIO recognises the growing interest in organoid research and offers a range of products to support scientists in developing models for tissue morphogenesis and organogenesis, conducting studies on tumours, diseases, and infections, drug testing, toxicity screening, and personalised and regenerative medicine.
Read the interview in full:
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Perfect Double Protecting Communications Stored in Images
A breakthrough in secure communications has been achieved by an international team of researchers led by the University of Oxford who have developed an algorithm capable of concealing sensitive information.
Dr Christian Schroeder de Witt, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, said: “This breakthrough in secure communications promises unprecedented levels of security and efficiency to its users, who may enjoy a much higher extent of plausible deniability than with previous steganographic methods. We will be working with all relevant communities of stakeholders, including humanitarian aid workers and investigative journalists, to unlock its potential in the real world.”
Working in close collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, the new method applies to a setting called steganography, the practice of hiding sensitive information inside of innocuous content; this differs from cryptography because sensitive information is concealed in such a way as to obscure the fact that something has been hidden. An example could be hiding a Shakespeare poem inside an AI- generated image of a cat.
The research team used recent breakthroughs in information theory, specifically minimum entropy coupling, which allows one to join two distributions of data together such that their mutual information is maximised, but the individual distributions are preserved.
As a result, with the new algorithm, there is no statistical difference between the distribution of the innocuous content and the distribution of content that encodes sensitive material. The algorithm was tested using several types of models that produce auto-generated content, such as GPT-2, an open-source language model, and WAVE-RNN, a text-to-speech converter. Besides being perfectly secure, the new algorithm showed up to 40% higher encoding efficiency than previous steganography methods across a variety of applications, enabling more information to be concealed within a given amount of data. This may make steganography an attractive method even if perfect security is not required, due to the benefits for data compression and storage.
The research team has filed a patent for the algorithm, but intend to issue it under a free licence to third parties for non-commercial responsible use. This includes academic and humanitarian use, and trusted third-party security audits. The researchers have published this work as a preprint paper, as well as open-sourced an inefficient implementation of their method on Github. They will also present a paper ‘Perfectly Secure Steganography Using Minimum Entropy Coupling’ at the premier AI conference, the 2023 International Conference on Learning Representations in May.
Contributing author Professor Jakob Foerster (Department
of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) added: ‘This paper is a great example of research into the foundations of machine learning that leads to breakthrough discoveries for crucial application areas. It’s wonderful to see that Oxford, and our young lab in particular, is at the forefront of it all.’
The study also involved Samuel Sokota and Professor Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and Dr Martin Strohmeier from armasuisse Science+Technology, Switzerland. The work was partially funded by a EPSRC IAA Doctoral Impact fund hosted by Professor Philip Torr, Torr Vision Group, at the University of Oxford.
Christian Schroeder de Witt (Credit: John Cairns)
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