We’ll be skiing at 95, living well past 125 – with our brains controlling machinery that’s symbiotic with our bodies. Or so said Geoffrey Ling, director of the biological technologies office at DARPA. He spoke about the sci-fi future of neuroscience while on a panel this week at the World Medical Innovation Forum in Boston.
Ling was joined by Ajay Verma, vice president of Experimental Medicine at Biogen (hold the Idec); and GlaxoSmithKline bioelectronics R&D vice president Kristoffer Famm. The trio was tasked with discussing disruptive technologies in neurocare, and man, did they deliver:
Electroceuticals
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The role that neuromodulation, specifically in the form of electroceuticals, will play in the future of medicine sparked just a really fantastic – and perhaps fantastical – trip down the rabbit hole of neuroscience futures.
Electroceuticals are small, implantable devices – the size of a grain of rice – that are attached to peripheral nerves to modulate neural signals. Famm pointed out that these newfangled therapies may actually work inordinately better than the pill.
Your standard small molecule drug is, after all, a blunt tool when treating something as delicate as a neuropsychiatric disorder. After all, the molecule you might want to control in the pancreas may also be made in the heart – so if you treat one thing, you invariably impact the other.
Regulating the electrical firings of neural circuit, however, can be far more precise, Famm said.
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“Neuroscience reaches beyond the neuropsychiatric system,” Famm said. “Many early opportunities we see for electroceuticals are in metabolic, cardiovascular and inflammatory disorders, for example.”
The brain/machine interface
The idea of implanting electrical devices to modulate the neural pathways led to a more sci-fi discussion. DARPA has a reputation for its flights of the fantastical, and science director Geoffrey Ling made no exception in his animated description of the future of neurocare:
“Think back to the major milestones in human advancement – think of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and so on,” Ling said. Human evolution has been all about creating tools that advance society, and making them work with our own physiology. Our ancestors used hammers as more powerful extensions of our bodies; the iPhone today is a smart extension we use with our hands to collect and disseminate information.
“Imagine Einstein if he had a laptop, not a pencil and paper, what he could do,” Ling said.
The next step, Ling said, is to just embed the technology within ourselves. Create mechanic extensions of our bodies that can be controlled by our brains. Next generation science will work synergistically with machines, he said: We’ll be able to get data into the brain, and process it at extraordinary rates – without being limited by, say, your eyes.
“The brain/machine interface isn’t something to be afraid of – it’s something to be embraced,” Ling said. “We’ve gotten to the threshold of just that.”
Why evolve a superhuman?
“What’s the average condition?” Varma asked. “Why do we get sick?”
The legacy of genetic evolution, he said, is that everything starts to decline right after most animals wrap up their reproductive years. But now, we’ve outgrown our genetic constraints – life expectancy and lifestyle have changed remarkably in the past 200 years.
But our genes haven’t adapted. Molecular mechanisms that protected us from drought are now leading to hypertension. Genes that prevented starvation are now the spark for this global obesity epidemic.
“So we have a different equation now – why don’t we superadapt?” Varma said.
Let’s head back to earth, guys.
Famm brought the discussion back to reality.
“Don’t get caught up in this obsession in creating some superhuman, when in reality we have the power of making much better medicines,” Famm said. “We can go and make supermen after that.”
