

The future of healthcare: electronic brain implants - bfe
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/487fb69e-db1f-11e1-8074-00144feab49a.html

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wtracy
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The article seems to not be available in Google's cache, either.

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bfe
Sorry -- here are excerpts:

"Imagine a pharmaceutical company 20 or 30 years from now. Moving beyond
conventional drugs that interact biochemically with the body, it will have
built a big “bioelectronics” business that treats disease through electrical
signalling in the brain and elsewhere.

Neurological problems, from stroke and epilepsy to depression, will be treated
through electronic implants into the brain rather than pills or injections.
Even diabetes and obesity will be attacked in ways that seem like science
fiction today, by sending electrical signals to malfunctioning cells.

That remarkable vision comes from one of the world’s most powerful
pharmaceutical executives, Moncef Slaoui, head of research and development at
GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug company.

“At present every pharmaceutical and biotech company makes chemical or
biological molecules that target [biochemical] structures such as proteins in
the body,” said Mr Slaoui. “No one is designing medicines to interact with the
electrical signals that are the other language of biology.”

With enthusiastic support from Sir Andrew Witty, his chief executive, and
other senior colleagues, Mr Slaoui wants GSK to become the first large company
to make bioelectronics a central plank of its long-term planning.

“The sciences that underpin bioelectronics are proceeding at an amazing pace
at academic centres around the world but it is all happening in separate
places,” he says. “The challenge is to integrate the work – in brain-computer
interfaces, materials science, nanotechnology, micro-power generation – to
provide therapeutic benefit.”

...

Today, only a minuscule fraction of the electrical activity in people’s brains
can be read by computer. Even so, recent experiments have given spectacular
results.

Perhaps the most remarkable was a recent US clinical trial in which
tetraplegic patients used their thoughts to direct robotic arms. The research
team, led by John Donoghue and Leigh Hochberg at Brown University, released a
video of a 58-year-old patient called Cathy, whose mental activity drove a
robot to pick up her drinking bottle from a nearby table and move it up to her
mouth so that she could sip some coffee. A heartwarming smile illuminated
Cathy’s face after she had drunk without help from a human carer for the first
time in 15 years.

The BrainGate system developed by the Brown University team has a sensor,
about the size of a small aspirin pill, with 100 hair-thin electrodes
implanted into the top of the patient’s motor cortex, the brain area that
controls movement. It is connected to an external computer, which translates
the neural activity into commands to drive a robot.

According to another paralysed patient called Bob, hard thinking is not
required: “I just imagined moving my own arm and the [robotic] arm moved where
I wanted it to go.”

...

Some of the best bioengineers in the US, including John Rogers of the
University of Illinois, Brian Litt of the University of Pennsylvania and
Jonathan Viventi of New York University, are developing a new generation of
soft computer interfaces, made with flexible silicon circuitry that can bend
and stretch to match the curves of the brain.

...

Although bioelectronics research currently focuses on the brain, its potential
extends much wider. “Electrical signalling is not confined to the central
nervous system,” says Mr Slaoui. “We could make use of signalling in the
peripheral nervous system too.”

...

“The beauty of electrical signalling is that it has only a local effect,” says
Mr Slaoui. In contrast, even a well- targeted drug drenches the whole body in
unwanted chemical."

(small percentage of article excerpted under statutory fair use, 17 USC 107.)

