Here’s a story with a slight Cyborg ring to it: An implantable brain device that can potentially restore the memory of patients with traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and related conditions is being developed at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The technology sits at the nexus of human, neuron-based memory and digital, computer chip-based memory: The device is implanted into the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus – the portions of the brain associated with memory. It then uses real-time recording and closed-loop stimulation of neural tissues to “bridge gaps in the injured brain” and restore a person’s ability to create new memories and access old ones.
The lab’s goal is to build an implantable prototype that can begin clinical testing by 2017; Medtronic and the University of California, Los Angeles are collaborating on the research and design. The program just received up to $2.5 million from DARPA’s Restoring Active Memory program.
It’s actually part of President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative that last year tasked researchers to really delve deep into the inner workings of the noggin. DARPA’s aptly named RAM program actually focuses most on traumatic brain injury, which has been diagnosed in some 270,000 servicemen since 2000.
“Currently, there is no effective treatment for memory loss resulting from conditions like TBI,” LLNL’s project leader Satinderpall Pannu said in a statement, adding that it plans to develop cutting-edge medical devices “that will change the health care landscape.”
Researchers are working to develop an electrical neuromodulation system that also investigates how memories are formed in the first place. The conceptual design of such a device will also have the patient wear an external device around their ear to store digital memory storage and retrieval data.
“The RAM program poses a formidable challenge reaching across multiple disciplines from basic brain research to medicine, computing and engineering,” Itzhak Fried, lead investigator for UCLA on this project, said in a statement. “But at the end of the day, it is the suffering individual, whether an injured member of the armed forces or a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, who is at the center of our thoughts and efforts.”
