‘Brain pacemaker’ has epilepsy and Parkinson’s in its sights

A ‘pacemaker for the brain’ that could help to treat epilepsy and Parkinson’s is being developed by scientists.

Artwork - generic image of head and brain with brainwaves, electrical activity. Lightning brain.

A “pacemaker for the brain” that could help treat epilepsy and ­Parkinson’s is being developed by scientists.

The implant listens to brain waves and responds to emerging seizures with personalised electrical stimulation, which experts hope could cut attacks and ­improve patients’ lives.

The device has not yet been tested on humans and will need to prove itself in several rounds of trials before being considered for patients.

Tests on macaques have shown that the device could detect when they were preparing to move a joystick and it could ­deliver electrical signals that ­delayed the movement.

Scientists now hope the wireless artefact-free neuromodulation device (Wand) can learn to recognise the signs of tremors and seizures in patients with neurological disorders and automatically apply the right type of stimulation to counter them.

Rikky Muller, of the University of California, Berkeley, senior author of the research, said: “We want to enable the device to figure out what is the best way to stimulate for a given patient to give the best outcomes. And you can only do that by listening and recording the neural signatures.

“The process of finding the right therapy for a patient is ­extremely costly and can take years. Significant reduction in both cost and duration can ­potentially lead to greatly ­improved outcomes.”

In a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, Dr Muller showed the device could simultaneously record electrical activity in 128 points in the brain and deliver stimulation in monkeys. “Because we can actually stimulate and record in the same brain region, we know exactly what is happening when we are providing a therapy,” she said.

Wand was then able to detect when monkeys were about to move in response to a task and delay their reaction times significantly in real time, all automatically and without any input from the researchers.

“While delaying reaction time is something that has been ­demonstrated before, this is, to our knowledge, the first time that it has been demonstrated in a closed-loop system based on a ­neurological recording only,” Dr Muller said. “In the future we aim to incorporate learning into our closed-loop platform to build intelligent devices that can figure out how to best treat you, and remove the doctor from having to constantly intervene.”

She hopes that the device might ultimately be used in treating epilepsy, which involves bursts of electrical activity that result in seizures, as well as Parkinson’s, in which tremors are caused by the lack of a neurotransmitter that regulates movement.

Deep brain stimulation, involving high-frequency electrical pulses, is known to improve Parkinson’s patients’ movement by changing signalling mechanisms in the brain and Dr Muller suggests that the Wand device could ultimately improve the way this is delivered.

The Times