PROVIDENCE – Researchers at Brown University have received a $6.3 million federal grant to fund the development and testing of a device designed to restore muscle control and sensation in people who have suffered a spinal cord injury.
The grant, from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was announced late last week.
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Brown researchers plan to work alongside neurosurgeons from Rhode Island Hospital, where team members hope to recruit volunteers with spinal cord injuries to be implanted with an experimental device for up to 29 days. As patients participate in physical therapy, the device will record and stimulate the spine.
The experimental interface was developed by researchers, physicians at Rhode Island Hospital, and commercial partners Intel Corp. and Micro-Leads Medical. The device records signals traveling down the spine toward the injury site and uses them to push electrical stimulation below the injury.
Signals travelling up the spine will be used simultaneously to drive stimulation above the injury site.
Researchers hope that the device will help restore muscle control as well as feeling that was lost due to injury.
“We know that the circuits around a spinal lesion often remain active and functional,” said the project’s leader, David Borton, an assistant professor at Brown’s School of Engineering and a researcher at the Carney Institute for Brain Science. “The hope is that by using information from either side of a lesion in a bidirectional way, we could make a significant impact on the treatment of spinal cord injuries. This exploratory study aims to build the toolset – the mix of hardware, software and functional understanding of the spinal cord – to make such a system possible.”
For the first two years of the project, researchers plan to focus on signals related to leg control and standing, along with bladder control, which has been reported as the primary concern from people with spinal cord injuries.
“This is truly a transformational effort that has the potential to have a significant impact in the lives of patients with spinal cord injury, particularly for our veterans with war-related spinal cord damage,” said Dr. Ziya Gokaslan, neurosurgeon-in-chief at Rhode Island and Miriam hospitals, clinical director or Lifespan’s Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute and chair of neurosurgery at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown.
