A multi-electrode implant is surgically placed over the spinal cord below the injury. Each electrode stimulates a specific neural pathway that controls a group of muscles. A spinal injury can be devastating. With a loss of movement in limbs, even performing everyday tasks like picking up a glass of water could become near impossible. In spinal injuries, signals from the brain are inhibited or even terminated before they reaches the limbs. A patient with such an injury could spends years in painstaking physiotherapy before they attain a normal level of functionality and mobility in their affected limbs. But this could change drastically.
A research group at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have developed the brain-spine interface, a wireless implant that connects the motor cortex in the brain and many neural circuits around the spinal cord. The system is now being tested on two monkeys that had paralysed legs and the results are nothing short of astonishing--the procedure had the primates walking again within just two weeks of their debilitating injury.
Professor Grégoire Courtine, a research professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne said, “This is the first time neuro-technology restores locomotion in primates.
But there are many challenges ahead and it may take several years before all the components of this intervention can be tested in people.” He also added, “To implement the brain-spine interface we developed an implantable, wireless system that operates in real-time and enables a primate to behave freely without the constraint of tethered electronics.” The study claims that both monkeys were walking again after using the brain–spine interface for two weeks, although, one of the monkeys gained the movement in its disabled leg after just six days.
Here's how it functions: the brain–spine interface reestablishes communication between the motor cortex and spinal nerves to restore communication between the brain and the limbs. The mechanism decodes brain signals in real-time, then transmits them wirelessly to the implant in the spinal cord, effectively creating a neural-electrical bridge between the monkey's brain and its leg tendons. This system is destined for initial human clinical tests by the end of the decade.
Source: DNA - November 11,2016.
