5 Lifesaving Medical Breakthroughs

From a wireless pacemaker the size of a vitamin pill to a DNA test that can identify life-threatening bacteria in minutes instead of days, these new advances are already transforming patients' lives.

1. A tiny wireless pacemaker that gives heart patients the freedom to dance again

"I used to be so exhausted by dinnertime, I could barely move off the couch," Mary Lou Trejo, 77, remembers. Now the Columbus, Ohio, woman mows the lawn and weeds her garden; she even recently painted her garage door. And it's all thanks to a wireless pacemaker that's the size of a large vitamin pill.

Unlike conventional pacemakers, which are implanted through the chest and have electrical wires that run through a vein to the heart, this tiny version requires minimally invasive surgery, explains cardiologist John Hummel of Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, where he is leading a clinical trial of the device.

Being wireless, it can be threaded through an artery in the groin and then attached directly to the heart muscle. Unlike the traditional dual-chamber model, it is designed to stimulate just one chamber of the heart, so for now it's being used only in people with bradycardia, a slow, irregular heartbeat that can cause fatigue, dizziness, fainting andshortness of breath — all the symptoms that used to plague Trejo. Not anymore. "My daughter says I run rings around her now," she says, laughing.

2. A new immune- boosting 'vaccine' that could revolutionize cancer treatment

Ask 67-year-old Harold Steffen how much better he's feeling since he began an experimental pancreatic cancer treatment, and he'll give you this convincing example: He had the energy to go marathon shopping with his daughter as she hunted for a wedding dress last summer. "She looked at 65 dresses, and I hung in there for the whole thing," he says proudly.

Steffen, a retired computer programmer from Woodinville, Washington, had been undergoing chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer for three years. "It was having less of an effect," he says of the treatments. They were also leaving him exhausted both emotionally and physically.

That's when his doctor, Vincent J. Picozzi Jr., a pancreatic cancer specialist with Virginia Mason Hospital and Seattle Medical Center, told him about a new clinical trial testing immunotherapy, in which a patient's immune cells are used to attack the cancer. The two-pronged treatment works like a vaccine in getting the body to identify and attack destructive cells. First, two types of pancreatic cancer cells "teach" the patient'simmune system to "recognize pancreatic cancer cells as bad," says Picozzi. Then a second treatment, an injection of the genetically altered bacteria Listeria monocytogenes, stimulates the immune system to fight those cells.

The treatment, given intravenously every three weeks, "is much milder than chemo," Steffen says. Even better: It has kept his cancer in check.

Next page: A hybrid hearing aid that offers hope. »Read More.