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Dr Nick Opie
One of the treatments for managing Parkinson’s Disease is to use deep electrical brain stimulation to relieve debilitating symptoms like muscle stiffness and tremors.
But it’s a daunting procedure. Surgeons must cut into the skull to expose the brain and stimulate it directly. Unsurprisingly, this kind of open brain surgery carries with it a long list of risks, including brain trauma.
What if the brain could be stimulated without having to drill a hole in patients’ skulls?
A team of Melbourne based researchers have been working on a replacement for open brain surgery since 2012, inventing a stimulation device that can be implanted in blood vessels next to the brain’s motor cortex, in a minimally invasive procedure involving a small ‘keyhole’ incision in the neck.
The device, called a Stentrode, measures just 4mm in diameter and is made from a strong but very flexible alloy called nitinol.
In 2016 the team, which includes researchers from the University of Melbourne, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, The Royal Melbourne Hospital and Synchron Australia, demonstrated that the Stentrode can record neural signals in the brain.
Now, they have shown the same device can not only ‘listen’ to brain signals, but also ‘talk back’ – delivering currents directly to targeted areas of the brain, known as ‘focal brain stimulation’. The results are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“We were able to not just passively record, but also deliver currents through the device to cause muscle movement,” says lead researcher Dr Nick Opie from the University of Melbourne’s Vascular Bionics Laboratory.
The proof-of-concept discovery is the first time this kind of brain stimulation has been achieved using a device permanently implanted inside a blood vessel, instead of through invasive direct brain stimulation.
Dr Opie believes the range of potential applications is huge.
“There are probably ways the technology could be used that we haven’t even thought of, yet, so we’re really keen to hear from clinicians on their ideas,” he says.
“Some of the obvious applications include offering an alternative to the deep brain stimulation that is currently used to treat Parkinson’s symptoms, and also as a replacement for some drugs in treating certain kinds of epilepsy.”
Deep brain stimulation is also used in some instances to treat serious mental illnesses like major depression, and the team are optimistic that Stentrode could offer these patients a less invasive alternative too.